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SOME SOLDIER POETS 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

POETRY 

1899. THE VINEDRESSER AND OTHER POEMS 

1901. APHRODITE AGAINST ARTEMIS 

1903. ABSALOM 

1903. DANAE 

1905. THE LITTLE SCHOOL 

1906. POEMS 
1911. MARIAMNE 

1911. A SICILYAN IDYLL 

1914. THE SEA IS KIND 
PROSE 

1899. THE CENTAUR AND THE BACCHANT FROM 

THE FRENCH BY MAURICE DE GUERIN 

1900. ALTDORFER 

1904. DURER 
1906. CORREGGIO 

1910. ART AND LIFE (FLx4lUBERT AND BLAKE) 

1915. HARK TO THESE THREE 



SOME 
SOLDIER POETS 

tT STURGE MOORE 



NEW YORK 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 

1920 









PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED 
EDINBURGH 



CONTENTS 



IMTUODUCTION 






7 


JULIAN GRENFELL . 






13 


RUPERT BROOKE 






21 


A HAT.F PI.EIADE 






27 


R. E. VF.RNEDE 






. 45 


SORLEY . 






55 


FRANCIS LEDWIDGE . 






69 


EDWARD THOMAS 






77 


F. W. HARVEY . 






. 87 


RICHARD ALDINGTON 






95 


ATAN SEEGER . 






107 


THE BEST POETRY . 






. 119 



NOTE 

Grateful acknowledgment is due to the courtesy with 
which authors or their representatives and their pub- 
lishers have most generously permitted me to quote — 
Lord Desborough from Julian Grenfell's poem ; Mr 
Edward Marsh and Messrs Sidgwick & Jackson from 
Rupert Brooke's poems ; Captains Siegfried Sassoon and 
Robert Graves, Lieutenants Robert Nichols and Richard 
Aldington and Mr Laurence Binyon from their own 
poems ; Bishop Frodsham from those of Lieutenant 
Harvey, then a prisoner ; Professor W. R. Sorley from 
Captain Sorley's, Mrs Edward Thomas and Mrs R. E. 
Vernede from their husbands' poems. Lord Dunsany and 
Mr Herbert Jenkins from those of Francis Ledwidge, and 
Mr Charles Louis Seeger and Messrs Constable from Alan 
Seeger's poems. 



INTRODUCTION 

These essays are occasional. They are incomplete and 
tentative, as must be every reply to a fortuitous demand. 
I have not chosen my themes by any deep affinity or 
because I had a native bent for studying them, but 
because they were thrust before me and some of my 
thoughts flocked out to meet each. 

I sketched characters based on analysis of work, not 
on information about authors, yet have since learned that 
some of these literary portraits seemed good likenesses 
to the friends of the man portrayed, and the friends of 
other poets have desired to see their literary characters 
sketched by me. 

Young poets are old-fashioned, like Nature herself ; 
they have usually not yet acquired the professional desire 
to be in advance of the public. Nothing seems hackneyed 
to genius, and youth is perhaps half genius. 

What a work is not is always more obvious than what 
it is, as critics are never weary of proving. I have tried 
to build with positive qualities, and to obtain relief by 
laying on shadows lightly, as the best topographical 
draughtsmen did their pearly washes of diluted Indian 
ink. 

What is poetry ? Why are so many young people 
tempted to try their hands at it ? Wrong answers to 
these questions are naturally more numerous and fashion- 
able than right answers. But we can never see poetry in 
relation to national life until we get hold of right answers. 
Poetry is a creation or discovery in the use of words 
that wakes or strengtl ens emotion in us, thus enlarging 
consciousness. The poet is not full of emotions and per- 
ceptions that need expressing, as a vat is full of grapes, 
though no doubt human nature — complete, ideal — is 
latent in him. He is, like all young creatures, playful. 
He plays with langTiage, attracted by its beauties and 

7 



INTRODUCTION 

possibilities, and in doing so he does for himself what 
afterwards his poems do for us — he awakens or creates 
emotions in his heart that it knew little or nothing of 
before, and as he continues he clarifies, strengthens and 
adds to them. 

The Muse is light-footed, but does not, like Poe, consider 
a poem more essentially poetical for being short. No, as 
children continue their Indians and Pirates from day to 
day and from one holidays to another, she sustains the 
poet's interest in Arcady or Babylon, in murderous king 
and incestuous queen, for years together, and renews it 
from age to age ; yet she often welcomes novel themes. 
She loves to defeat the '' proud limitary " theorist who 
is for a hole-in-the-corner business, with one properly 
labelled ware of a high quality. One generation having 
deified classical example, she prompts the next to scoff 
at " monstrous Milton " ; yet will very likely lead the 
scoffer's son back to that blind man's feet. In fact, like 
children, she hates a declared purpose ; for the game is 
best when the players forget themselves entirely in it, 
even though it be preaching, for then she loves a sermon. 
The poet is only a poet when he lays aside the interests 
of his life among his neighbours and shares her free 
absorption over anything or everything. To live poetry 
as Rupert Brooke dreamed of doing is impossible, for 
though Life may follow, she can never overtake those 
immaterial feet. The welfare of one man, of one neigh- 
bourhood, of one nation or period, is a pettifogging affair 
when past and future lie open. If the poet treats of his 
own love he must be careful not clearly to distinguish her 
from Helen of Troy, or should, at least, give us the illusion 
that they are equally real to him. That is why failure in 
love and war is so much more inspiring to the poet than 
success ; when the real world has rejected a man he feels 
freer in the Muses' house ; he no longer has any interests 
that conflict with theirs. 

8 



INTRODUCTION 

Poetry is more profound and significant than prose, 
wiser and weightier, at once more primitive and more 
refined ; for the fashion of this world passes, but the 
moods of that remain. They build mth durable, precious 
materials which, though invisible, are stronger and 
touoher than steel, and more difficult than radium to 
account for. The poet is not the odd sheepish person 
whom his friends know, but the worthy playmate of 
Polyhymnia. In fact the wider the difference the freer 
the poet is from personal taint. Some " nice man " was 
Shakespeare to his London, but our Shakespeare was and 
still is more imposing than Lord Verulam, yet never 
could be met in any street. 

What is poetry ? Why do youths love it ? To read 
verse and watch young men answers both questions, but 
who shall sum those answers up in words ? One at present 
fashionable answer may be worth combating so as to set 
off the largeness and vigour of that apparent truth which 
defeats the tongue. Why do young men write verse ? 
They want to express themselves, their own sense of things. 
This answer only shows how deeply the fallacy of impres- 
sionism has sophisticated modern aesthetic thought. No 
one escapes. The impressionist looks upon his individual 
pecuHarities as the source of value. He offers to exploit 
the Peru of his mind for the benefit of the world. He 
would work it with scientific nicety, or else record the 
whimseys of feeling, seeing and thinking to which he is 
subject when most alarmingly unlike other men, and thinks 
thus to add new facts to our knowledge, enlarge our ex- 
perience. He does, but Apollo is not interested in his 
wonders as glimpsed from a garret. ' ' Intolerably severe ' ' 
he has frowned on these votaries who are content with 
what they see. He smiles on those who, forgetting them- 
selves, follow his splendour into the open. Their worship 
can never enough divest itself, not only of walls and roof, 
but of coat and shirt, so as to feel his glory with every pore. 

9 



INTRODUCTION 

Whereas those others try to frame their sense of him, which 
is small, these flatter him with a whole-hearted imitation, 
creating little gardens with stick and ink and paper as 
he creates the world for joy with light. 

More minds are capable of an interest in persons than 
in beauty, as the appetite for gossip and scandal shows. 
The impressionist theory was bound to catch on ; it 
panders to so common a weakness. " Know thyself ! " 
" Be true to your own experience." Yes, but not because 
you are you, or it is yours, but because you are not adequate, 
it cannot suffice, and to realise these limits till they ache 
is to extend them, throw them off and enlarge your life. 
The difference of attitude is enormous, far more real 
than any that can be drawn between romantic and classical 
or realist and idealist. The artist never does express 
himself ; but, in trying to create objects, a by-product of 
mannerisms and shortcomings piles up like a heap of 
shavings, and this distinguishes his work from that of 
other artists. The poet who is keen about a poem and 
the poet who is anxious about his reputation are two 
persons, though like light and darkness they may alter- 
nately occupy the same room ; one casts the other out. 
The master draws importance from the masterpiece, not 
this from him : his glory is a reflex light from its worth. 

But do I not in sketching these characters truckle with 
this vice ? A character is formed by a transparent and 
elastic envelope of limitations like a soap-bubble ; it is 
easy to attribute those iridescent hues to that tegument 
of defect, but they are due to the form which the energy 
within supports. This escapes ; a slop of soapy water 
falls ; so when life evades, the body caves in and moulders. 
The hope which is my excuse is that I have focused atten- 
tion on no slimy limitations but on the shape bestowed 
by that expansive energy. 

Life is impersonal except while prisoned in some alien 
material, to which it gives as perfectly as possible an im- 
10 



INTRODUCTION 

mortal form. At least it is safest to think of it as im- 
personal until we can follow it out of one form into another : 
at present it disappears and reappears, like but not neces- 
sarily the same. I treat of poets, not of persons. Poetry- 
is a form of vitality due to the fact that language can be 
filled with significance in such a way as to catch the light 
and appear transformed in texture and value. The poet's 
words are mere words, nevertheless ; we all use and misuse 
them. His success is limited by their defects, just as it 
has always been seconded by the energy with which un- 
countable minds have charged them. So the poem has 
a distinct character, a distinct life, and a distinct fate, 
fuller than the poet's in some respects, narrower in others. 
It too is a bubble into which life passes through the 
artist as through a pipe often cracked, choked or faulty ; 
besides the materials he works with, the soap is not all 
good, there may be too much or too little water, and at 
.last when the perfect globe sails away nobody happens to 
be looking. The game is one of many hazards. Theorists 
insist that only those bubbles that sport a certain blue or 
green or purple are true art. But no dye, no pigment 
helps ; and a more generously endowed faculty discovers 
that a change in the angle of regard can awaken any of the 
seven hues on all that float the air ; for not subject and 
sentiment but form and texture import ; emotions and 
themes are only tabooed by prejudice. The rainbow ad- 
miration even hovers over the bowl of suds, and any bubble 
round enough might be induced to travel alone if chivied 
about with a conviction equal to that of the moment's 
fashion. History is draughty, capriciously so, and to- 
morrow will not correct all the mistakes of to-day. Chance 
often defeats fine work while it treasures trash. These 
poets have been chosen at random out of the hundreds 
that are laimched by the Press. I cannot pretend to any 
assurance that I have chosen the largest or the most 
prosperous voyagers. Twenty years ago the public gave 

11 



INTRODUCTION 

comparatively little attention to youngsters and their 
poetry. Perhaps the public attitude has changed more 
than young men and their work. First the turn of the 
century made the future seem more interesting because 
it had got a new name ; lately these boys became heroes, 
defenders, creditors, and people were anxious to pay them 
with sympathy and understanding. This more human 
attitude no doubt exhilarates the poets. Manly youth 
during these last four years, like a Niagara, has been 
thundering down into an abyss and the few bubbles whose 
beauty floats upward are pathetically disproportionate 
to its volume and sound. To realise the cost of the forms 
of social life yet experimented in by man is to turn in 
horror from the past towards the future. But only by 
gazing steadily back can we discern what life has produced 
and therefore may again shape to warrant this outlay. 
Art and poetry, to such a steady gaze, make up perhaps 
half of that acceptable excuse for man's existence. Nay, 
more than half; for heroism, personal charm, beauty, 
holiness, wisdom and even knowledge live again reflected 
and absorbed into works of art, and only so find adequate 
remembrance. 

POSTSCRIPT 

The war is over, and I add to these studies of Soldier 
Poets a lecture on The Best Poetry read before the Royal 
Society of Literature on 27th March 1912, in hopes of 
balancing and completing their significance. Young 
poets have frequently produced perfect things, but these 
have rarely been of any length. Much practice and 
familiarity with the possibilities of words and thoughts are 
required in complex creations. In discovering The Best 
Poetry the qualities of great works must be scanned in 
due relation to the excellences of lyrics, and thus, perhaps, 
this examination of work by necessity immature may be 
thrown into perspective and refresh without confusing. 

12 



JULIAN GRENFELL 

V 

The war has confounded matter-of-fact calculation and 
made most people aware of unprized volcanic resources 
in human nature. However, some men, many young men, 
have always felt moved, supported or opposed by agencies 
of which they could give no consistent account to the 
seasoned worldling. Rhythms and cadences which express 
or seem to lead on to the expression of life's hidden value 
take possession of young minds, control and contort their 
speech into jangling rhyme which, since the war, has ac- 
quired increasing popularity, till critics remember how 
during the wars of Napoleon verse sold better than prose, 
and wonder whether this may not happen again. The 
customs and cares of civil life dishearten and depress, 
and a run on poetry would be proof of reawakened sensi- 
bility. Let us hope that England, where life has seemed 
both stablest and stalest, is to be refreshed by a wave of 
finer enthusiasm. The young will feel it first, for they 
are never stale or established. Of all the young men 
whom England has sent out to fight, he who has produced 
the best poem seems to have least hesitated, answering 
the call to fight with ecstatic joy. 

Captain the Hon. Julian H. F. Grenfell, D.S.O., was 
born on 30th March 1888, obtained a commission in the 1st 
Royal Dragoons in September, 1909, and died of wounds 
on 26th May 1915, having written the following poem about 
a month earlier : — 



INTO BATTLE 

The naked earth is warm with Spring, 
And with green grass and bursting trees 
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying. 
And quivers in the sunny breeze ; 

13 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

And life is Colour and Warmth and Light, 
And a striving evermore for these; 
And he is dead who will not fight, 
And who dies fighting has increase. 

The fighting man shall from the sun 
Take warmth, and life from glowing earth ; 
Speed with the light-foot winds to run 
Aiid with the trees to newer birth ; 
And find, when fighting shall be done, 
Great rest, and fiSness after dearth. 

All the bright company of Heaven 
Hold him in their bright comradeship, 
The Dog star, and the Sisters Seven, 
Orion's belt and sworded hip : 

The woodland trees that stand together. 
They stand to him each one a friend ; 
They gently speak in the windy weather ; 
They guide to valley and ridges end. 

The kestrel hovering by day. 
And the little owls that call by night, 
Bid him be swift and keen as they. 
As keen of ear, as swift of sight. 

The blackbird sings to him : " Brother, brother, 
If this be the last song you shall sing. 
Sing well, for you may not sing another ; 
Brother, sing." 

In dreary doubtful waiting hours, 
Before the brazen frenzy starts, 
The horses show him nobler powers ; — 
O patient eyes, courageous hearts ! 

And when the burning moment breaks. 
And all things else are out of mind. 
And only joy of battle takes 
Him by the throat and makes him blind, 

14 



JULIAN GRENFELL 

Through joy and blindness he shall know, 
Not caring much to know, that still 
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so 
That it be not the Destined Will. 

The thundering line of battle stands, 
And in the air Death moans and sings ; 
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, 
And Night shall fold him in soft wings. 

Many readers are exhilarated by this who cannot be at 
the pains to ravel out its seciet ; and I propose to help 
them, that the impression may last longer and satisfy 
more completely. Young Grenfell exults at fulfilling an 
inborn promise. At last he feels free to be what instinct 
and capacity make him ; general consent and his own 
conscience permit him to kill and to die. The ecstasy is 
like that of married love i a fundamental instinct can be 
gratified untaxed by inward loss or damage and with the 
approval of mankind. Harmony between impulse and 
circmnstance creates this joy ; but not only is it more 
complex than that of the young male stag who attacks 
the leader of the herd, there is in it an element of quite a 
different order, a sense that wrong within can be defeated 
by braving evil abroad. The strain between worldly 
custom and that passion for good which begets spiritual 
insight, finds relief in fighting, looks for peace in death. ^ 
Only the noblest spirits when young so intolerably feel 
this strain that they welcome such an end as delicious 
satisfaction. Acquiescence in evil seems to them too 
high a price to pay for life. As though it were a devil, they 
would cast out all complicity with it from themselves as 
from others. This is the focus of their activity and until 
; it is found they have no peace. Shelley is recognised as 
a type of the young poet, and this eagerness to attack 
! evil in the world and thisl readiness to die characterise 
r him, though his weapon was the pen and he faced death 

15 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

in crazy boats and fever-stricken hovels and not in 
battle. 

The intimate delicacy and justness of this marvellous 
lyric will appear more brilliantly yet if we contrast the 
aspects which arouse its eloquence with those more com- 
monly selected when the theme is war. 

Throughout the poem no hint is given of the nature 
of the enemy ; he does not proclaim, as so many have 
done, that he fights for right or against tyranny. He 
does not himself look forward to tasting the fruits of 
victory ; he accepts death as the natural necessary 
reward of taking up arms. Even in peace he had chosen 
to serve by being ready to fight. Yet he does not cry up 
devotion to England. You will say Ms was obvious. 
That is just it, true poetry does not say what is unnecessary. 

That a young man of this gentleness should be glad 
both to kill and be killed shows that the maityr and the 
soldier are not opposite types but stand before the deeply 
moved conscience as equal heroes. Both are finest when 
each most resembles the other : the martyr, courageous, 
unflinching, capable of detachment and courtesy to the 
last : the soldier, conscientious, humane and unaggressive : 
St Stephen and St George. The quality of emotion in 
these stanzas will serve as a touchstone to imperialist 
and pacifist theories. True peace is not signed by govern- 
ments, but is something never yet achieved on earth. 
That so-called peace which preceded the war must have 
created the exultant relief to have done with it which 
this young man felt. And we know he was right, we 
know its foul shame, we know how unworthy it was of 
the name we so fondly gave it. Peace indeed ! 

The sanity of a true inspiration is miraculous and avoids 
errors which we all breathe and utter, and yet does not 
fall into the opposition of that half illumination which, 
like a bee on a window-pane, angrily buzzes itself to death 
because it sees but cannot enter the light. Neither is 
16 



JULIAN GRENFELL 

it passive, disclaiming part and parcel in humanity's 
tragedy, as though there were any other means of support 
than man's widespread good will. Men and nations, we 
all depend for what we are permitted to be on friendliness 
and co-operation. 

The senses both of mind and body are tender, all callous- 
ness impairs them. The slaves of machinery, with their 
real-polilik and subserviency to fact, are in all countries 
striving to stifle liberty, poetry, joy. But kindness is 
stronger than discipline and courtesy more victorious 
than munitions. 

Since I wrote this a pamphlet has been published with 
extracts from Julian Grenf ell's letters ; these strengthen 
and endorse the impression received from his poem. He 
was a born fighter : there is a wonderful description of a 
boxing match he had with a champion at Johannesburg, 
too long to quote here but very worth reading. After he 
had been knocked down three times he remarks that his 
" head was clearing." Yet he can also write : 

" I hate material books, centred on whether people are 
successful. I like books about artists and philosophers 
and dreamers, anybody who is just a little bit off his dot." 

Success in this present world is a little incompatible 
with real success ; one is a trifle beside the mark of the 
other even when they seem to coincide. 

"I longed to be able to say that I liked it, after all that 
one has heard of being under fire for the first time. But 
it is beastly. I pretended to myself for a bit that I liked 
it, but it was no good ; it only made me careless and un- 
watchful and self-absorbed ; but when one acknowledged 
to oneself that it was beastly, one became all right again 
t and cool." 

So his head began to clear again just in time. 

^ Julian Grenf ell : A Memoir. By Viola Meynell. Burns & Oates. Is. 
B 17 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

" Here we are in the burning centre of it all, and I would 
not be anywhere else for a million pounds and the Queen 
of Sheba." 

Consciously or unconsciously he repeats the sentiment 
that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Henry V. at Agin- 
court and Sir Henry Newbolt into Nelson's in his Admirals 
AIL That sentiment characterises the bom leader : 
when facing danger he feels that he is where he can best 
prove what he is. He felt " utterly ashamed " of himself 
when he had met a German officer prisoner with a scowl, 
the other looked so " proud, so resolute, smart and con- 
fident in his hour of bitterness." This instant challenge 
and rebuke of himself was akin to his mastery and initia- 
tive. He begged to be allowed to go out into " No Man's 
Land " stalking Germans, and was refused. At last : 

" They told me to take a section with me, and I said I 
would rather cut my throat and have done with it. So 
they let me go alone." 

His experiences are as good reading as the fight at 
Johannesburg, but too long to quote. 

" I got back at a sort of galloping crawl and sent a 
message to the 10th that the Germans were moving up 
their way in some numbers. . . . They made quite a 
ridiculous fuss about me stalking, and getting the message 
through. ... It was up to someone to do it instead of 
leaving it all to the Germans and losing two officers a day 
through snipers. All our men have started it now. It is 
a popular amusement." 

But first is first to-day just as when David met Goliath. 
A piece of bursting shell has deprived us of a great leader, 
with the characteristics of the finest kings of men. And 
though wealthy enough to travel with dogs and horses 
wherever he went, he could not bear to think that a friend 
18 



JULIAN GRENFELL 

had deserted the Sociahst cause out of respect for "the 
loaves and the fishes." This friend writes : 

" I don't suppose many people knew what an ardent 
love he had for honesty of purpose and intellectual honesty, 
and what sacrifices he made for them — sacrifices of peace- 
of-mind abhorrent to most Englishmen . . . caused him- 
self no end of worry and unhappiness . " 

Yes, facing discomfort clears the will, as facing physical 
danger clears the head, and wrong within can be defeated 
by braving evil abroad. And now while intellectual 
honesty is at a premium I will confess that the last two lines 
of his Into Battle always disappoint me. They ring hollow 
and empty ; it is as though he had been disturbed and 
scribbled in haste something that looks like an end but 
is not, and never given his mind to the poem again. 

The other poems published since are slighter in mood 
and more boyish in execution. Though they are not bad, 
they are not good enough to enhance the effect of Into 
Battle, 

Physically, mentally and morally splendid, he might 
seem to have done little in this world but be and be de- 
stroyed. Yet to have been, and to be known to have been 
such as he was, may well in time seem one of the grandest 
facts of these times. Such admiration as we owe to him 
is an experience as rare as it is beneficent, and will out- 
last a vast number of topics and crazes. Two phases of 
his worth he revealed even to those who never met him : 
the one in his poem, the other in his letters ; and they 
tally as the like aspects have rarely tallied in other men. 
This proves the density of the integrity that was destroyed 
by a fragment of iron. He lay wounded a few weeks 
before he ceased to suffer. 

The worst horror of modern war is not the vastness of 
its destructions but the number of spirits whom it en- 
slaves to machinery ; and in this it closely resembles 

19 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

modern peace. The plough lacerates the turf, many lowly 
and lovely lives are sacrificed that wheat may be sown 
and a taller, straighter growth raised to sustain a higher 
pulse of life. But how many of our modem machines 
create what is useless or harmful, at the expense of the 
best life both of those whose profit is intended and of those 
whom they exploit ! Is there so much choice between 
the horrors of war and those of peace when they are truly 
estimated that the pacifist should prefer them or the 
imperialist wish to re-establish them ? That men should 
be forced by the self-seeking of others to linger in want 
or to die in cruel torture is equally abhorrent. The hope 
of all generous spirits is to have done by means of the war 
with the peace that they have known and to usher in a 
better order. And Grenfell cheers this hope as few can, 
foreshowing a better proportioned life. The limpidity 
and strength of his emotion, though it creates beauty and 
reveals wisdom, was seconded by no matured art ; yet 
those who have this at command are so liable to fail just 
where he succeeds, in sureness of aim. 



20 



RUPERT BROOKE 

Rupert Brooke was beginning to be kno^vn both as a 
poet and for rare personal beauty when his death at the 
age of twenty-eight, on his way out to the Dardanelles, 
set him beside Sir Philip Sidney as scholar, soldier, poet 
and patriot. 

There was a factitious element in this burst of acclama- 
tion, something we can hope the man himself would have 
responded less and less to. Though the beauty of his 
person and the daintiness of his verse and the gentleness 
of his manners made worldlings eager to spoil him, he was 
not averse to hard work, and maintained a certain reserve 
which augured a better future for him than that of a darling 
of fashion. He and his young Cambridge friends of both 
sexes seem to have cherished an ideal of free comradeship, 
and to have realised it in an uncommon degree without 
paying toll in scandals to the censorious world. In like 
manner his verse, though playful and ornamental, so toys 
with philosophical inquiries as to hint at latent resources 
of graver power. Such problems as whether any com- 
munions are possible, whether I can know you or you me, 
and whether existence is absolutely conditioned by time 
and space, are whimsically put and illustrated in such 
instances as a fish, or a single moment of one particular 
tea in a dining-room. 

" Oh ! never fly conceals a hook, 
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook, 
But more than mundane weeds are there, 
And mud, celestially fair ; 
Fat caterpillars drift around, 
And Paradisal grubs are found ; 
Unfading moths, immortal flies, 
And the worm that never dies. 
And in that heaven of all their wish 
There shall be no more land, say fish." 

21 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

Only an arch levity saves this from being trite. I should 
have to quote too much before I could illustrate his amuse- 
ment with the possible delusions of men's thoughts. But 
occasionally a serious shudder is glimpsed behind the 
smiling mask. 

" And suddenly there's no meaning in our kiss 
And your lit upward face grows, where we lie, 
Lonelier and dreadfuller than sunlight is. 
And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky." 

His sovran preoccupation, that which inspired his best 
poems, was the least suitable for one whom some have 
imagined cut out for the part of a modern Antinous, to 
whom the elite of London, both male and female, should 
corporately play the part of a platonic Hadrian. His 
thoughts flocked about death. At first he dallies with 
them. 

" Oh ! Death will find me, long before I tire 
Of watching you ; and swing me suddenly 
Into the shade and loneliness and mire 
Of the last land ! There, waiting patiently. 
One day, I think I'll find a cool wind blowing, 
See a slow light across the Stygian tide, 
And hear the dead about me stir, unknowing. 
And tremble. And I shall know that you have died 
And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream. 
Pass light as ever, through the lightless host. 
Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam — 
Most individual and bewildering ghost ! — 
And turn and toss your brown delightful head 
Amusedly, among the ancient Dead." 

But his contemplation of possible significance in life's 
end passes gradualty into serener moods. 

CLOUDS 

Down the blue night the unending columns press 
In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow. 
Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow 
Up to the white moon's hidden loveliness. 

22 



RUPERT BROOKE 

Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless, 
And turn with profound gesture vague and slow, 
As who would pray good for the world, but know 
Their benediction empty as they bless. 
They say that the Dead die not, but remain 
Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth. 
I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these, 
In wise majestic melancholy train, 
And watch the moon and the still-raging seas, 
And men, coming and going on the earth." 

At last in his finest poem these reveries rise to an ex- 
pression worthy of the classics of our language. 



THE DEAD (1914) 

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares. 

Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth, 

The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs, 

And sunset and the colours of the earth. 

These had seen movement, and heard music ; known 

Slimiber and waking ; loved ; gone proudly friended ; 

Felt the quick stir of wonder ; sat alone ; 

Touched flowers and furs, and cheeks. All this is ended. 

There are waters bloTMi by changing winds to laughter 

And Ht by the rich skies all day. And after, 

Frost, with a gestiu'c, stays the waves that dance 

In wandering loveliness. He leaves a white 

Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, 

A mdth, a shining peace, under the night. ^ 

The remoteness and impersonality of this sadness, with 
the wide horizon and unifying candour, compel our deepest 
welcome. The effort to startle, allure, or amuse has 
vanished. No doubt the devotion to England, dwelt on 
in the other sonnets of the 1914 sequence, won more of 
the praise ; but some who acutely felt his charm were 
conscious of a falsetto emphasis in those efforts to say the 

1 Quotations by permission of Brooke's literary representative, 
E. Marsh, Esq. 

23 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

I right thing at the right moment, although his death had 

I doubled their appeal. 

Poems demand to be read aloud by someone who has 
instinctive sympathy for the pace, tone and address proper 
to each. For many the interest must at first, and perhaps 
long, lie in the mental attitude revealed. Nor is this 
attitude a small or insignificant part of the impression 
which ought to be made by poetry — the most perfect speech 
of man, as it has been called — that is, the utterance to 
which the greatest number of his faculties combined in 
harmonious balance contribute. The way the speaker 
has borne himself, and the way he now confronts the world, 
must influence this harmony profoundly. His words 
betray his past a,nd present to those whose attention is 
sufficiently continuous and searching, by indices that lie 
around and beyond the mere meaning of the sentences 
used — indices gleaned from their interplay and the degree 
in which each alters and defines the whole sense, as much 
as from the melody of the words or the rhythm of their 
just enmiciation. This aroma, which arises from the 
organism of the meaning, translators can often convey 
to other nations ; for the beauties of diction and rhythm, 
many among those who speak the same tongue should 
accept the verdict of trained appreciators. Now melody 
and rhythm often engross trained apprehension, and the 
less learned may therefore be more ready to note the grave 
drift of wonder which flows beneath the playful, indulged 
and indulgent surface of Brooke's art, than were his 
aesthetic admirers. Those eyes which gaze out from be- 
hind his poems have been fascinated by the contrast 
between the momentousness of life to us, and our strangely 
casual relation to its vast movement, which is not at all 
suited to nourish our hopes of divining the whole truth. 
Those eyes seem to dance ; for has not methodic inquiry 
begun to reconsider what it had denounced as entirely 
fabulous ? Death's door, which Spencer, Renan and 

24 



RUPERT BROOKE 

•Nietzsche regarded as finally closed, is well-nigh ajar once 
more. Brooke's amused alertness is like that of a child 
who watches a door emphatically closed upon a cupboard 
declared to be empty by grown-up assurance ; it creaks, 
and mysteriously seems to stir ; other little boys and girls, 
his playmates, pay scant attention to its unaccountable 
behaviour. He himself thinks he has seen that the cup- 
board was vacant, and yet, in spite of himself, is fascinated 
by the possibility of a ghostly opener. Smiling over his 
o^Ti fancies, Brooke seems to have sat half abstracted at 
a pleasure party till the outbreak of war. He immedi- 
ately volunteered, though delicate and but recently 
returned from a voyage across America and through the 
Pacific Islands in search of health — health which finally 
failed him before he had struck a blow or fired a shot, 
, though he had been to Antwerp with the naval expedition. 
' To-day he stands with Julian Grenfell, as I see them 
through their work, in attitudes that suggest statues more 
worthy of the acropolis of the supreme city than any of 
' those which the public figures of these times have yet 
, assumed. What is done is always faulty, but what is 
I intended may sometimes be divinely fair ; and early 
death leaves this untampered with. Finely wrought 
bronze, these youths and their peers from other lands stand 
in that lofty garden above the ideal town, listening to 
their " friends " the trees. At their feet children play on 
the grass, and yoimg girls cnmtible bread to lure doves down 
from the heroic shoulders ; while for the men who glance 
at them in passing the inspiration of their bearing is all 
that remains of the Great War. The ardent Grenfell 
leaps forward ; Brooke with smiling grace escapes from 
the uncomfortable admiration of a bygone age — both bent 
on grasping by the hand their new and best friend. Death. 



25 



' 



?i 



A HALF PLEIADE 

Let St Beuve's avowal justify this title : " All these 
Academies, between you and me, are pieces of childishness, 
at any rate the French Academy is. Our least quarter 
of an hour of sohtary reveries or of serious talk, yours and 
mine, in our youth, was better employed ; but as one 
gets old one falls back into the power of these nothings ; 
only it is well to know what nothings they are." So the 
significance of serious thought and discussion about art 
is apt to hold an inverse ratio to the number and age of 
those who think and discuss ; for the future is always in- 
visible. Robert Nichols, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert 
Graves, friends by their own avowal, have possibly had 
this importance in intimate conclave, AVho can be sure 
that they have not deserved my title ? They make no 
claim to be reformers or a movement, but such announce- 
ments are perhaps a fashionable foible, a trait which will 
disparage and date our period a hundred years hence. 
" The political virus even infected literature ; writers and 
artists called themselves impressionists, symbolists, futur- 
ists, imagists and cubists ; they published programmes 
and manifestoes, the charlatans ! " as some unborn Taine 
may phrase it. 

Rupert Brooke's verse had a conscious elegance that 
diverse judges attribute either to his treasuring a meagre 
vein or to a wary nature's perception that there had only 
yet been time to polish one of its many facets. In Robert 
Nichols' work variety and abundance are more evident 
than artistry and selectness. As if to make up for this he 
has prefaced his volume -^ with two quotations from An 
Introduction to the Scientific Study of English Poetry, by 
Mark Liddell. These passages, though neither new nor 
perfectly expressed, suggest that Nichols' attention has 
been absorbed by the rehearsal of passionate experience 

^ Ardours and Endurances. By Robert Nichols. Chatto «fe Windus. 

27 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

or its reverberation through imagined scenes, rather than 
by niceties of style or prosody. All that he means by 
'^ a rhythm of ideas " is that the sense of the words should 
inspire the cadences of their sound ; for, of course, in its 
major structures as well as in line and stanza, rhythm is a 
sensuous character only applicable to ideas by a metaphor. 
Poetry is, he thinks, "a marvel of the brain" funda- 
mentally the same in all men ; the poet only excels by 
more perfect organs of perception and expression — a con- 
ception in generous contrast to that of the young man, 
who is so keen on distinguishing his work as to whittle his 
gift away in the effort to remove all trace of kinship with 
other minds. On the other hand, only time will show 
whether Nichols will say a great deal in a manner not 
sufficiently distinct to live, or will fulfil the promise every- 
where apparent in this book. 

" On either hand the slender trees 
Bow to the caressing breeze, 
And shake their shocks of silver light 
Against skies marbled greenish-white, 
Save where, within a rent of blue, 
The tilted slip of moon glints through, 
Glittering upon us as we dance 
With a soft extravagance 
Of limbs as blonde as Autumn boughs 
And gold locks floating from moony brows. 
While anguished Pan the pipes doth blow 
Fond and tremulous and low. ..." 

A good omen ! We are reminded of the sweetest music 
of classical English. It is not easy to imitate ; let those 
who think it is, echo so fine a strain so freshly. Nothing 
comes of nothing, but out of imitative admiration grow 
the grand wings of the Muses. However, this Faunas 
Holiday is a rambling, shapeless poem, though it constantly 
threatens to be better than it anywhere is. With the 
anxiety of one who expects to surpass himself Mr Nichols 

28 



A HALF PLEIADE 

appends "Oxford, Early Spring, 1914," to the poem, 
which is preceded by a note telHng us that one part is 
adapted from a version of 1912 and another only com- 
posed as late as July, 1914. To set so seriously about 
helping your biographer is charmingly youthful. Another 
pre-war poem called The Tower describes Judas leaving 
the Last Supper : 

"... one arose to depart 
Having weakness and hate of weakness raging within 

his heart 
And bowed to the robed assembly whose eyes gleamed 

wet in the light " — 

and at the bottom of the tower found beside the door — 

" Mary of Seven Evils, Mary Magdalen. 
And he was frighted at her. She sighed : ' I dreamed 

him dead. 
We sell the body for silver . . .' 

Then Judas cried out and fled." 

Though the texture of the poem has been accepted too 
easily, these are touches of imaginative power which may 
lead to greater things. Possibly his best poem is — 

THE RECKONING 

The whole world burns, and with it burns my flesh. 

Arise, thou spirit spent by sterile tears ; 
1 Thine eyes were ardent once, thy looks were fresh, 
I Thy brow shone bright amid thy shining peers. 
I Fame calls thee not, thou who hast vainly strayed 
, So far from her ; nor Passion, who in the past 
' Gave thee her ghost to wed and to be paid ; 
I Nor love, whose anguish only learned to last. 
I Honour it is that calls ; canst thou forget 
( Once thou wert strong ? Listen, the solemn call 
I' Sounds but this once again. Put by regret 
j For summons missed, or thou hast missed them all. 
K Body is ready. Fortune pleased ; O let 

Not the poor Past cost the proud Future's fall. 

29 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

With that he turns to enhst. It is a little difficult to 
guess what " Fortune pleased " may refer to. Possibly 
that, in sounding him this new, terrible summons, Fortune 
shows herself pleased to give him a new chance of re- 
trieving whatever in his life had gone awry. The rest is 
touching in its sincerity, all the more for its somewhat 
grandiloquent address. 

Wistful, hesitant, eager, boyish, yet already regretful 
over things done ill — all the ingenuous flutter of an am- 
bitious but not yet fully sinewed nature — ^with what image 
shall we associate the attitude of Robert Nichols in this 
book? Sculpture is too definite. But a fresco in the 
Prytaneum. Not a large panel nor in a central place. I 
see a boy battling in a strong wind with a shirt from which 
he cannot free his wrists. Splash ! splash ! his com- 
panions plunge into the sea, he totters with impatience, 
half laughs at his own misfortune, blushes at seeming to 
lag behind, yet thrills at the possibility of retrieving all 
and being first at the goal. But many of these poems are 
dreamy ! and was not our lad in a muse when he forgot 
to unbutton those wrist-bands, before pulling his shirt 
over his head ? Look, the sky is grey, the water rough, 
the wind deafening ; only those who swim for honour 
will not defer the race. 

With Siegfried Sassoon we have "glad confident 
morning " ; he does easily and well what he desires to do. 
His rhythms never hark back to Milton's youth as Robert 
Nichols' did ; they stop short at John Masefield and 
Thomas Hardy. The longest poem^ is a monologue. 
The speaker, an old huntsman, has become inn-keeper, 
only to lose his savings instead of increasing them ; he 
lazily maunders about life and religion, the point being 
the piquancy of vulgar notions of hell and heaven, when 
travestied in images drawn from his narrow round of 
experience with the pack and behind the bar. It might 

^ The Old Huntsman and Other Poems. Heinemann. 5s. 
30 



I 



A HALF PLEIADE 

be claimed by those anxious to show that this young 
poet's roots strike deeper than I have suggested that this 
poem resembles Browning's Caliban on Setebos. The 
book at first seems merely smart, buoyed on good health 
and good fortune, "like little wanton boys who swim on 
bladders." 

STAND TO : GOOD FRIDAY MORNING 

I'd been on duty from two till four. 

I went and stared at the dug-out door. 

Down in the frowst I heard them snore. 
' " Stand to ! " Somebody grunted and swore. 
' Dawn was misty ; the skies were still ; 

Larks were singing, discordant and shrill ; 
I They seemed happy ; but I felt ill. 

Deep in water I splashed my way 

Up the trench to our bogged front line. 
I' Rain had fallen the whole damned night, 
' O Jesus, send me a wound to-day. 

And I'll believe in Your bread and wine, 

And get my bloody old sins washed white. 

I Graves' tone is more felicitous in this vein, his cynicism 
^ is less consciously aggressive. 

STRONG BEER 

Tell us, now, how and when 
We may find the bravest men ? . . . 
Oh, never choose as Gideon chose 
By the cold well, but rather those 
Who look on beer when it is brown. 
Smack their lips and gulp it down. 
Leave the lads who tamely drink 
With Gideon by the water brink. 
But search the benches of the Plough, 
The Tun, The Sun, The Spotted Cow, 
For jolly rascals, lads who pray, 
Pewter in hand, at close of day, 
" Teach me to live that I may fear 
The grave as little as my beer." 

31 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

Nichols is hardly ever so successful as these two pieces 
are, yet even his war poems (records of casual scenes and 
moods), which cannot be said to push beyond appearances, 
are warmer and not so arid as Sassoon's, not so trivial as 
Graves'. 

" ' 'Ello ! wot's up ? ' ' Let's 'ave a look ! ' 
' Come on, Ginger, drop that book ! ' 
' Wot an 'ell of bloody noise ! ' 
' It's the Yorks and Lanes, me boys ! ' 

So we crowd : hear, watch them come . . . 

One man drubbing on a drum, 

A crazy, high mouth-organ blowing. 

Tin cans rattling, cat-calls, crowing . . . 

' 'Ip 'urrah ! ' ' Give Fritz the chuck. ' 
' Good or bloody Yorks ! ' ' Good luck ! ' 
' Cheer ! ' 

I cannot cheer or speak 
Lest my voice, my heart must break." 

His comrades' intentions are thinner than this, indeed 
so fully rewarded with a grin that the title "poet" 
appears misplaced. Slangy cynicism characterises many 
of Sassoon's poems, but reading on, something deeper is 
discovered. 

" When I'm among a blaze of lights, 
With tawdry music and cigars 
And women dawdling through delights. 
And officers at cocktail bars, ... 
Sometimes I think of garden nights 
And elm trees nodding at the stars. 

I dream of a small fire-lit room 

With yellow candles burning straight, 

And glowing pictures in the gloom. 

And kindly books that hold me late. 

Of things like these I love to think 

When I can never be alone : 

Then someone says : ' Another drink ? ' . . . 

And turns my living heart to stone." 

32 



A HALF PLEIADE 

Nothing could be better than that "When I can never 
be alone." It is as apt as it is simple, worthy of any 
master. 

So he yearns from the crowd, the mud, the din at the 
Front ; and when he gets home on leave he walks up 
round the house where his friend used to live, and through 
the wood they often paced together, seeking for com- 
munion with him, though he is dead. 

" Ah, but there was no need to call his name. 
He was beside me now, as swift as light. 
I knew him crushed to earth in scentless flowers, 
And Hfted in the rapture of dark pines. 
' For now,' he said, ' my spirit has more eyes 
Than heaven has stars ; and they are lit by love. 
My body is the magic of the world, 
And dawn and sunset flame with my spilt blood. 
My breath is the great wind and I am filled 
With molten power and surge of the bright waves 
That chant my doom along the ocean's edge. . . .' " 

Thus sorrow opens the flood-gates of his eloquence. 
Yet though it less suggests abundance. Graves' simpler, 
briefer Not Dead is perhaps more effective. 

" Walking through trees to cool my heat and pain 
I know that David's with me here again. 
All that is simple, happy, strong he is. 
Caressingly I stroke 
Rough bark of the friendly oak. 
A brook goes babbling by : the voice is his. 
Turf bums with pleasant smoke ; 
I laugh at chaffinch and at primroses ; 
All that is simple, happy, strong, he is. 
Over the whole wood in a little while 
Breaks his slow smile." 

Here both young scoffers are in earnest. And though 

Graves succeeds best, one doubts whether he will task 

himself enough for greater things, whereas throughout 

Sassoon's book, with its ghb impressionism playing with 

c 33 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

worn themes in order to make something out of the wrong 
side of them, there is a touch of strength, a gift for suc- 
ceeding to-day which will help him when he turns his mind 
to its true work. But on this theme also Nichols, in spite 
of his less steady hand, can match them both, perhaps 
surpass either. 

OUR DEAD 

They have gone from us. O no ! they are 

The inmost essence of each thing that is 

Perfect for us ; they flame in every star ; 

The trees are emerald with their presences. 

They are not gone from us ; they do not roam 

The flow and turmoil of the lower deep, 

But have now made the whole wide world their home, 

And in its loveliness themselves they steep. 

They fail not ever ; theirs is the diurn 

Splendour of sunny hill and forest grave ; 

In every rainbow's glittering drop they burn ; 

They dazzle in the massed clouds' architrave ; 

They chant on every wind, and they return 

In the long roll of any deep blue wave. 

The grief is that a voice like our own, a mind which had 
communed with ours, has been replaced by a world-wide 
absence : travel where we will, the well-known hail can 
never surprise us again. An end has been reached. 
Rupert Brooke's sonnet gives splendid expression to the 
strange awe of this silent, empty prospect. Yet all three 
of these younger poets, in a strain of slightly affected 
pantheism, console themselves that what they have lost 
is added to what remains — invisibly present in it ; and 
you are set pondering whether inspiration leavened the 
literary convention, derived from Shelley's Adonais, 
sufficiently to give their having done this, force as a hint 
of some deep human trait. What place do we really 
think " our dead " should take in our lives ? The poet 
who would convince us of the truth would need to be not 
34 



A HALF PLEIADE 

only daring and honest as these boys, but wise and 
profoundly gentle. 

A shirt was clinging to Nichols' image, but Sassoon 
appears in full uniform, equal to every claim made by a 
day of action. Or is his smartness rather intellectual 
than practical ? Derision hardly consists with might 
and main. Scorn abstracts itself and stands aside. The 
dapper mind is exasperated by fatigue and danger, and 
ever tries to reserve for self-realisation a few crumbs of 
time and energy. Shall we not picture this satirist better 
huddling under a greatcoat in some chilly dug-out? 
Refusing to drop asleep, he muses of his room in college, 
or holds a book he is too tired to read for a few seconds 
near his candle-end before putting it out. Preoccupied 
with to-day, he is of the best that it recognises in itself. 

But no ! How easy it is to be unjust ! Another little 
book ^ arrives, clearer-voiced ; in it the self-conscious grin 
opens to a bitter laugh, while on its later pages the soul 
rebels, repents and aspires, with grace and power. 

BANISHMENT 

I AM banished from the patient men who fight. 
They smote my heart to pity, built my pride. 
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side, 
They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light. 
Their wrongs were mine ; and ever in my sight 
They went arrayed in honour. But they died, — 
Not one by one : and mutinous I cried 
To those who sent them out into the night. 

The darkness tells how vainly I have striven 

To free them from the pit where they must dwell 

In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven 

By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel. 

Love drives me back to grope with them through hell ; 

And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven. 

1 Counter- Attack and Other Poems. Siegfried Sassoon. Heinemann. 
2s. 6d. 

35 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

For a young officer to refuse to lead more men to death 
may give proof of truer courage than to continue to do it 
without conviction. Such insubordination is abundantly 
excused both by the facts that prompted it and by the 
action that retrieved it. 

Were all men capable of such mutinies war would cease. 
War is forced on many whose souls rebel against it by 
many who seek profit in it, whether for themselves, their 
caste or their nation. But these were surely more numerous 
and more dominant among our enemies than on our side : 
yet even Prussians are men. How many of us repel the 
offer of an unfair advantage ? how many pounce on it ? 
This solidarity of the average man with them gives war- 
lords their power, which must be broken symbolically in 
fact before the human spirit will discipline its appetite 
for exploiting weaker men. Grenfells are needed to 
subjugate this dragon ; but they will recognise brother 
spirits among the conscientious objectors, who brave not 
only the enemy but the whole world. Just as Sassoon's 
scorn for many common attitudes towards the war is too 
intellectual to inspire his best poetry, so censors of all 
mankind discover a theoretical nudity. Our dependence 
on our neighbours, even when we are forced to despise 
their judgment, is more certain than our own wisdom can 
be. Peace with its commerce was blighted with a like 
shame, waste and ruthlessness, yet who dissociated himself 
thus completely from its prosperity ? Then to refuse to 
soil the hands when millions must be stained will appear 
ungenerous, unless the danger run in keeping them so 
daintily clean exceed the common danger ; and even then 
the grace of a divine humility may not be superfluous. 
History has proved, however, that the Prince of Peace 
necessarily appears hostile to the average man until he 
rises from death, no longer to reason about property and 
liberty in the world but to appeal for service and integrity 
in the heart. 

ae 



A HALF PLEIADE 

Timon of Athens is frequently enacted in small on the 
nursery boards, often with a sixth act, an act as touching 
and more heroic than the prodigal son's last, when the 
scorned scorner returns to his world. In the splendour 
of early manhood such a repentant Timon is a rarer and 
grander figure — stooping his proud, honest head because 
though men are servile and treacherous, he who is neither 
is yet their brother in so many other ways that when 
Athens is besieged he claims to share their agony as a 
privilege. Such is the figure gazing on which my admiring 
eyes are misted, after reading this sonnet Banishment. 

Less passion, and an easier commerce with actuality 
would seem to characterise the poetry of Captain Robert 
Graves. His is a taking smile. 

*' The child alone a poet is : 
Spring and Fairyland are his. 
Truth and Reason show, but dim, 
And all's poetry with him. 
Rhyme and music flow in plenty 
For the lad of one and twenty, 
But Spring for him is no more now 
Than daisies to a munching cow ; 
Just a cheery pleasant season, 
Daisy buds to hve at ease on. 
He's forgotten how he smiled 
And shrieked at snowdrops when a child." 

As reason wakes, lads find themselves asked to accept 
not only the dumbfounding universe but monstrous social 
and political accumulations ; and, for the most part, 
religious ideals tangled with fabulous legend. For all 
this there is no simple and clear defence ; even genius is 
at a loss to create so much as an appearance of straight- 
forwardness or to deduce a practical course which you can 
pretend is, or has been, followed. This world's sublimest 
tact is the inept stare that refuses to see difficulties. 
Yoimgsters laugh, however seriously minded, for laughter 

37 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

is their one escape from the awe-inspiring immensity of 
the imposition. The more comprehensive the mind the 
more kinds of rehef it seeks in laughter. The young man 
who guys love, art, science, justice and the Bible is usually 
he who is most naturally gifted for pursuing ideals of 
affection, beauty, truth, righteousness and reverence. 
The middle-aged forget what they laughed at in youth : 
for my own part I cannot recall that there was any limit 
either of decency or reverence; Rabelais had not gone 
too far. Aristophanes proves that Athenian taste forbade 
no jest. And while the laugh rings in his ear no yoimg 
fellow of parts is inclined to deny it a universal privilege. 
I have even seen one joke about toothache while writhing 
with it. We first discover subjects that are no laughing 
matter under the lash of predicted consequences, as we 
accept servitude to social and political ends ; then we 
begin in revenge to outlaw indecency and irreverence. 
The young and gifted are right, aesthetic training and in- 
tellectual power must achieve an Attic freedom. We need 
not wonder then to find a young captain-poet writing in a 
jocular vein about his own wounds and death, and every 
subject that touches him with at all similar force. The 
quality of his laughter is all that concerns us ; and this, 
let me hasten to assure the long faces, is irreverent rather 
than indecent, fantastic rather than boisterous. Now 
faces are long because they have not laughed enough, not 
because they have been wise. 

The aesthetic expression of a comic sense is perhaps the 
most difficult problem taste has to face. The success of 
a jest, as Shakespeare said, " lies in the ear." Men become 
less ticklish and laugh less as life proceeds. A child so 
enjoys laughing it hardly needs a jest to set it off, and 
right on up to extreme old age no tears are more grateful 
than those squeezed out when both aching sides have to be 
held. But this physical enjoyment bribes the taste to be 
indulgent ; that we have laughed rebukes all censure of a 

38 



A HALF PLEIADE 

jest, just as not to have laughed puts our judgment out of 
court. But taste, hke the soldier, must face all odds and 
strive to remain honest and delicate, in spite of the 
natural man. 

Captain Robert Graves' humour attains a kind and 
degree of success similar to that of Robert Nichols' effort 
after beauty — ^glimpses and promises of felicity but not 
much more ; and he also finds a rival in Siegfried Sassoon, 
who soimds a like note of fantastic levity in his Noah and 
Policeman. This third star in the tiny constellation has 
on the whole the most definite character, a ray whose 
spectrum is more nearly unique. Many of his poems deal 
with the childhood he has so recently quit, in its home 
rather than its school side ; he seems to remain constantly 
aware of his knickerbocker self and of the family he made 
one of. Nonsense and laughter are still the happy relief 
from a probably more mature daily habit, which his rank 
might seem to infer — relief even after the most terrible 
experiences of trench life. 



Through long nursery nights he stood 

By my bed unwearying, 

Loomed gigantic, formless, queer. 

Purring in my haunted ear 

That same hideous nightmare thing. 

Talking as he lapped my blood. 

In a voice cruel and fiat. 

Saying for ever : ' Cat ! . . . Cat ! . . . Cat ! . . .' 

Morphia-drowsed, again I lay 

In a crater by High Wood : 

He was there with straddling legs, 

Staring eyes as big as eggs. 

Purring as he lapped my blood, 

His black bulk darkening the day — 

With a voice cruel and flat, 

' Cat ! ... Cat ! ... Cat ! ' he said. ' Cat ! . . . Cat ! . . .' " 

39 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 



ESCAPE 



"August 6, 1916. Officer previously reported died of wounds, 
now reported wounded : — Graves, Captain R., Royal Welsh Fusiliers." 

But I was dead, an hour or more. 

I woke when I'd already passed the door 

That Cerberus guards, and half-way down the road 

To Lethe, as an old Greek signpost showed . . . 

Dear Lady Proserpine . . . 

Cleared my poor buzzing head and sent me back . . . 

Breathless, with leaping heart along the track. 

After me roared and clattered angry hosts 

Of demons, heroes, and policemen-ghosts . . . 

There's still some morphia that I bought on leave. 

Then swiftly Cerberus' wide mouth I cram 

With army biscuit smeared with ration jam ; . . . 

A crash ; the beast blocks up the corridor 

With monstrous hairy carcase, red and dun- — 

Too late ! for I've sped through. 

O Life ! O sun ! 

This vivid resilience occurs not only after the most 
cruel physical agony, but during the long wearing-down of 
winter in the trenches — as difficult to bear as protracted 
toothache. 



TO ROBERT NICHOLS 

From Frise on the Somme in February, 1917, in answer to a letter 
saying: "I am just finishing my Faunas Holiday. I wish you were 
here to feed him with cherries." 

Here by a snow-bound river 

In scrapen holes we shiver, | 

And like old bitterns we I 

Boom to you plaintively : 

Robert, how can I rhyme 

Verses for your desire — 

Sleek fauns and cherry-time. 

Vague music and green trees, 

Hot sun and gentle breeze, 

40 



A HALF PLEIADE 

England in June attire 
And life born young again 
For your gay goatish brute . . . 
Lips dark with juicy stain, 
Ears hung with bobbing fruit ? 
Why should I keep him time ? 
Why in this cold and rime, 
Where even to dream is pain ? 
No, Robert, there's no reason; 
Cherries are out of season. 
Ice grips at branch and root. 
And singing birds are mute. 

His range is from Strong Beer to Christ, but is rather of 
theme than of mood, another hint of a more set character. 
Here is some half-mystical nonsense on the temptation 
in the wilderness : 

" He held communion 
With the she-pelican 
Of lonely piety. 
Basilisk, cockatrice, 
Flocked to his homilies, 
With mail of dread device, ... 
With eager dragon eyes ; 
And ever with him went . . . 
Comrade, with ragged coat. 
Gaunt ribs — ^poor innocent — . . . 
The guileless old scapegoat ; 
For forty nights and days 
Followed in Jesus' ways. 
Sure guard behind Him kept, 
Tears like a lover wept." 

. He confesses that even at trystings with a lady a third 
is always present, 

THE SPOIL-SPORT 

My familiar ghost again 
Comes to see what he can see, 
Critic, son of Conscious Brain, 
Spying on our privacy. 

41 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

The passages already quoted prove that, as a poet, he 
is disinclined to think effort worth while, and easily 
consents to imperfections characteristic of that phase of 
skill which distinguishes play from a profession. Colin 
Clout is more gentlemanly than Paradise Lost, even though 
it be less worthy of man. 

"What could be dafter 
Than John Skelton's laughter ? 
What sound more tenderly 
Than his pretty poetry ? 
So where to rank old Skelton ? 
He was no monstrous Milton 
Nor wrote no Paradise Lost, 
So wondered at by most, 
Praised so disdainfully, 
Composed so painfully. 
He struck what Milton missed, 
Milling an English grist 
With homely turn and twist. 
He was English through and through. 
Not Greek, nor French, nor Jew, 
Though well their tongues he knew. . . ." 

Yet, as good old Skelton pled : 
" For though my rhime be ragged. 
Tattered and jagged, 
Rudely rain-beaten. 
Rusty and moth-eaten. 
If ye take well therewith, 
It hath in it some pith." 

A just claim ; besides there is something ideal about 
absence of strain ; greatness has in Milton undoubtedly 
taken itself a shade too seriously. However, in the end 
one perhaps likes our humorist best when he is gravest. 

1915 

I've watched the Season passing slow, so slow, 
In fields between La Bassee and Bethune ; 
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring, 
Red poppy floods of Jime, 

42 



A HALF PLEIADE 

August, and yellowing Autumn, so 

To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow, 

And you've been everything. 

Dear, you've been everything that I most lack 
In these soul-deadening trenches — pictures, books. 
Music, the quiet of an English wood. 
Beautiful comrade-looks. 
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track. 
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black, 
j And Peace, and all that's good. 

Yes, he is the man who does not forget, whom to-day 
does not absorb ; he remains conscious of a crowd of younger 
selves, and of those distant places which have coloured his 
thought. At the front the absent are " everything," 
and after death " everything " becomes the lost friend. 
A complex and delicately poised nature, but perhaps 
lacking the passion and impetus that can shape large and 
difficult themes. Watts might have painted a young man 
leading a child through Gehenna and preventing its terror 
by keeping it laughing, but such allegories are not neces- 
sary or obvious enough for successful plastic treatment 
even by a great painter. Christophe's statue, Le Masque, 
is better conceived ; a smiling artificial visage still fronts 
the world from which the real agonised head has fallen 
back. From one view — 

" vols ce souris fin et voluptueux 
Oti la fatuite promene son extase " ; 

while from the other — 

" voici, crispee atrocement 
La veritable tete, et la sincere face 
Renversee a I'abri de la face qui ment," 

as Baudelaire describes the well-known masterpiece in the 
Jardin des Tuileries. Only I think to substitute a man 
for the woman would heighten the effect, and for this the 

43 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

imagination can relieve our young captain of his accoutre- 
ments and exchange his gas mask for one which laughs. 
Yes, nimble youth plays with life and death, and inter- 
changes agony with ecstasy, even as laughter sheds tears 
for very pleasure. 

Those who shall gaze back a century hence may discern 
rather in Nichols than in Sassoon or Graves the poet's 
mind that is independent of time and approaclies all 
human circumstance with the kinsman's joy or pain. It 
will depend on what they are yet to write, which of these 
three those distant readers are best able to strip and set 
free in the Palaestra of immortal youth with Grenfell and 
Brooke — companions meet for those who read with Plato 
or those who, a-horseback, passed Pheidias on the road, 
and who, also, most of them, matured and became differ- 
ent when Death had picked his favourites out. 



44 



R E. VERNilDE 

Self-praise is no recommendation, neither is a pro- 
fession of patriotism ; besides, the Germans have raised 
such a pother over theirs that silence would seem enjoined 
on all self-respecting men, for fear of even distantly re- 
sembling those blatant deluded souls. " The last resource 
of a scoundrel," Doctor Johnson called these professions 
of devotion to one's country ; and Gilbert laughed them 
down with his — 

" In spite of all temptations 
To belong to other nations. ..." 

We are what we are in this respect, neither by choice 
nor yet by merit, but by necessity. Most of us could not 
betray our country even if we were born treacherous, the 
situation would be too strong for us ; and it is only some 
unusual situation which can make praise for patriotic 
action due to a good man, or turn a weak man into a 
traitor. No doubt we were all pro-German to the extent 
of our faiHngs ; for nothing cumbers or hinders a country 
more than the shortcomings common to the majority of 
its people. Yet how easily intelligent men are lured 
away to indulge in this odious rhetoric ! How sane the 
common soldier is in this ; " Blighty " ^ is his name for 
the mother isle. No name could be more exactly de- 
served ; for a country is always, by collective action, 
blighting the best hopes and virtues of its sons ; and yet 
they feel for it the affection expressed in a pet name as for 
some impossibe old landlady who has contributed to all 
the happiness they have known. 

^"Blighty" is derived from the Arabic and hence Urdu {camp 
language) of the Mogul soldiery, Vilayat meaning a country, which has 
come in India to designate England or Europe, and the adjective 
Vilayati, English. But the British soldier in adopting the word for 
home or England accepted also^half humorously the sense associated 
with it3 deformed pronunciation. 

45 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

R. E. Vernede was a peace lover quite unfamiliar with 
weapons, over forty and married, yet he enlisted in 1914. 
He was a man of remarkable intellectual and moral 
delicacy, and yet his muse returns to this theme of 
patriotism, as a moth haunts a candle. He had deserved 
esteem for several works in prose, and his friends made 
sure that in time a more general and generous acknow- 
ledgment would accrue to him. He was of French 
descent, and these poems ^ show a fine sense for literary 
craftsmanship. The war made a poet of him, for the 
verses written prior to it are comparatively unambitious. 
Perhaps the lyrical impulse ai'oused was younger than 
the rest of his mind, or was it some French traditional 
reliance on trumpet-calls that set him toot-tooting ? 

" Oh War-lord of the Western Huns — that Army of Sir 

John's 
Your legions know it, do they not ? They drove it back 

from Mons — 
'Twas small enough . . . too small perhaps . . . the 

British line is thin . . . 
It won't seem quite so little when it's marching through 

Berlin." 

Surely Vernede cannot have voiced this boast for his 
own satisfaction. Do we listen to one for whom '' any- 
thing pretentious and pompous was a target " when we 
read — 

i 

" The sea is God's — and England, i 

England shall keep it free " ? 

Surely such things are intended to reach duller ears 
than his own. Imagine this ardent dreamer, suddenly 
surrounded with " Tommies," gaining rapid ascendancy 
over them by his moral elevation, but at the same time 

1 War Poems and Other Verses. By R. E. Vernede. Heinemann. 
3s. 6d. Quotations by permission of Mrs C. H. Vernede. 

46 



R. E. VERNEDE 

aching to express their inarticulate enthusiasms for them. 
An excellent motive, but the Muses have decreed that 
words and images must fascinate us before we can enthral 
others with them. We are told that " he insists on 
keeping sharp the blade of indignation"; but the 
Germans did that for us far better. Indignation has a 
grand force, but one which must owe nothing to self- 
culture ; to nurse it is to corrupt it — is indeed one of the 
knavish tricks of Prussian policy. 

I cannot help feeling that the Kaiser has done for the 
word " God " very much what " iiber alles " has done for 
professions of patriotism. Yet Vernede raps it out with 
all the assurance of a bishop. To-day it either means too 
much or too little for frequent use, save when addressing 
those who, like children, belong to an earlier world. The 
idea of Providence has become too simple, too many 
relations are implied to be so grouped, just as the idea of 
England has become too complex for Britannia's outfit. 
The country that triumphed over Napoleon was worse than 
an enemy to masses of her people under Castlereagh, and 
this and other contradictions subsist, though they are not 
quite so glaring. 

Vernede had been used to complain playfully that life 
was humdrum — that is, he was one of those many gifted 
men of whom England, to her shame, made no good use, 
damping their energies with the huge sponge of her 
lethargic materialism. His old schoolfellow, Mr G. K. 
Chesterton, has told us : "No man could look more lazy 
and no man was more active. He would move as swiftly 
as a leopard from something like sleep to something too 
unexpected to be called gymnastics. It was so that he 
passed from the English country life he loved so much, 
with its gardening and dreaming, to an ambush and a 
German gun." 

He pubhshed two or three not quite successful novels, 
visited India and Canada, and wrote pleasantly of what 

47 






SOME SOLDIER POETS 

he had seen. He played tennis, gardened and occasionally 
walked many miles very fast. But none of these things 
could absorb him. He was grateful for them, but not 
content with them. In thanking your country for such a 
life, a slight extravagance of compliment is gracious, but 
he would probably never have used it if she had not 
suddenly accepted from him the total dedication of 
himself ; he would have felt restrained by the fact that 
though she kept him and his peers in clover, she was 
keeping far greater numbers in want. 



A PETITION 

All that a man might ask thou has given me, England, 
Birth-right and happy childhood's long heartsease. 

And love whose range is deep beyond all soimding, 
And wider than all seas. 

A heart to front the world and find God in it, 
Eyes blind enow, but not too blind to see 

The lovely things behind the dross and darkness. 
And lovelier things to be. 

And friends whose loyalty time nor death shall weaken. 
And quenchless hope and laughter's golden store ; 

All that a man might ask thou has given me, England, 
Yet grant thou one thing more : 

That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendour. 

Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as I 
May in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthy, 

England, for thee to die. 

This chance to use himself thoroughly and to adventure 
greatly filled him with enthusiasm and hope. Emotion 
is simple-minded, and for a moment his world seemed all 
of one piece ; as broad meadows may be run together by 

48 



11 



R. E. VERNEDE 

a flood, everything was merged in a shining mirror of the 
uplifted sky. Still it is reassuring to notice by the dates 
of his poems that his landmarks were reappearing and 
that Germany and England are no longer just black 
and white. By December, 1916, he strikes truer, less 
complacent notes : 

"We have failed — we have been more weak than these 
betrayers — 
In strength or in faith we have failed; our pride was vain. 
How can we rest who have not slain the slayers ? 

What peace for us, who have seen Thy children slain ? 

Hark, the roar grows . . . the thunders reawaken — 
We ask one thing. Lord, only one thing now : 

Hearts high as theirs, who went to death imishaken, 
Coiu-age like theirs to make and keep their vow. 

To stay not till these hosts whom mercies harden, 
Who know no glory save of sword and fire. 

Find in our fire the splendour of Thy pardon. 
Meet from our steel the mercy they desire. . . , 

Then to our children there shall be no handing 
Of fates so vain — of passions so abhorr'd . . . 

But Peace . . . the Peace which passeth understand- 
ing .. . 
Not in our time . . . but in their time, O Lord." 



And later still we have 



A LISTENING POST 

The Sim's a red ball in the oak 

And all the grass is grey with dew. 
Awhile ago a blackbird spoke — 

He didn't know the world's askew. 

D 49 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

And yonder rifleman and I 

Wait here behind the misty trees, 

To shoot the first man that goes by, 
Our rifles ready on our knees. 



How could he know that if we fail 
The world may lie in chains for years 

And England be a bygone Tale 

And right be wrong, and laughter tears ? 

Strange that this bird sits there and sings 
While we must only sit and plan — 

Who are so much the higher things — 
The murder of our fellow-man. . . . 



But maybe God will cause to be — 

Who brought forth sweetness from the strong — 
Out of our discords harmony 

Sweeter than that bird's song. 



Though the rousing of Verne de's lyrical impulse was 
at first coincident with loss of discrimination, and might 
be condemned as aii attempt to shout with the crowd, 
I find its excuse, if not its justification, in that ardent 
Sympathy that at first wraps the confused soul in cloud, 
but will, like a late September morning by 10 a.m., grow 
glorious as a summer day. Readers only feel the insult 
of not being treated as an author's equals, in proportion 
as they are his peers. Now Verne de's peers can look 
after themselves, but the men he looked after in that hell 
at the front needed him, and needed such as he was, more 
than any other kind of officer. He was not artist enough 
to reconcile both these claims, but he chose the most 
important. All that he says of his friend we can safely 
transfer to himself ; the testimony of his brother officers 
is our warrant. 

50 



R. E. VERNEDE 



To F. G. S. 

(" Seriously wounded ") 

Peaks that you dreamed of, hills your heart has climbed 
on, 

Never your feet shall climb, your eyes shall see ; 
All your life long you must tread lowly places, 

Limping for England ; well — so let it be. 

We know your heart's too high for any grudging. 

More than she asked, you gladly gave to her : 
What tho' its streets you'll tramp instead of snow-fields, 

You'll be the cheeriest, as you always were. 

Yes, and you'll shoulder all our packs — we know you — 
And none will guess you're wearied night or day — 

Yes, you'll lift lots of lame dogs over fences, 
Who might have lifted you, for that's your way. 

All your life long — no matter — so you've chosen. 

Pity you ? Never — that were waste indeed — 
Who up hills higher than the Alps you loved so 

All your life long will point the way and lead. 

Such men are mature in a sense that most of us are not. 
The joy of recognising their characters, the joy felt in 
these verses, is in quality like that we might receive from 
a fine picture in which a strong man and a number of lads 
were shown hauling a boat up the beach — ^their muscular 
developments contrasted, their attitudes rhythmically 
applied to a common task. So, like a charm, the pre- 
sense of these growTi-up souls organises and increases our 
strength. Even Vemede's trumpet-calls give me glimpses 
of a man whole-heartedly playing with children in time he 
was free to give to some congenial hobby. What though 
his boyishness be a little out of fashion as compared with 
theirs ! He succeeds and keeps them even-tempered, 

51 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

brave and loyal. Several of these poems witness that 
he saw his " Tommies " as they were. What if the battle 
songs he wrote are not such as can ever quite win their 
favour, and can hardly better content a more refined 
public ? since for those, as for these, his life and death 
were his best poem. He had been ready to appreciate 
all his men's virtues and to make even all their de- 
ficiencies. They were his inspiration and he was theirs. 
This give and take between the leader and the led is more 
trustworthy than the rigidity of discipline, replacing it by 
life — a wonder of creation comparable to a master work in 
art. Augmented living ought perhaps always to precede 
a literary production which should be the spirit's paean for 
victory — for wider and more delicate lelations achieved — 
though at times it has been the bitter song of the van- 
quished, declaring that his loss is greater and other than 
the victor's gain. That grander pulse was throbbing 
through Vernede's veins, as his more frequent bursts of 
song and ever truer note testify ; the poet liberated in 
him was rehearsing the adequate lay which we shall never 
hear — and indeed the enemy did not gain by his death 
anything commensurate with what we have lost, even 
though such losses should kindle us more finely than that 
masterpiece unheard, unsung and for ever overdue could 
have done ! In two stanzas to his wife which now 
dedicate the book, Vernede himself underlines the differ- 
ence between promises and deeds, between words and the 
seal of death : 

" What shall I bring to you, wife of mine. 

When I come back from the war ? 
A ribbon your dear brown hair to twine ? 

A shawl from a Berlin store ? 
Say, shall I choose you some Prussian hack 

When the Uhlans we o'erwhelm ? 
Shall I bring you a Potsdam goblet back 

And the crest from a prince's helm ? 

52 



R. E. VERNEDE 

Little you'd care what I laid at your feet, 

Ribbon or crest or shawl — 
What if I bring you nothing, sweet. 

Nor maybe come home at all ? 
Ah, but you'll know. Brave Heart, you'll know 

Two things I'll have kept to send : 
Mine honour for which you bade me go 

And my love — my love to the end." 



58 



i\ 



SORLEY 

When we first admire a person after death we are apt to 
feel a kind of joy that he is now unalterable, not to be 
pottered over or finicked with or painted out for some 
supposed improvement. In spite of reason we cannot 
really regret Keats' maturity, much less his old age. As 
we have been prevented by the centuries from sitting on 
the jury which banished Pheidias, we dote on his maimed 
and footless Theseus, and doubt whether the marble has 
not been improved by rough-handed Time ; while we 
neglect or patronise the young sculptor in whom a like 
creative force struggles against the odds, with our long- 
established apathy. Only if we have followed its growth 
with all our hopes, a life seems broken through, snapped 
off and its promise wasted by early death. Then we 
wonder whether it is civilisation or barbarism that defends 
itself at such a cost. And the failure to preserve at least 
those who were creatively gifted from exposure, seems 
proof that our foresight was at fault, or our scale of values 
inadequate.! Sorley, the youngest, and it may be the 
most hope-inspiring of our poet soldiers, has set me 
musing thus. He is so fine. Death seems to have saved 
him from misshaping Life. 

His language is poor and thin, but it moves powerfully, 
and constantly suggests organic forms. This is most 
unlooked for in a tyro. Sensuous images are extra- 
ordinarily persisted in, and as strangely few. Rain, wind, 
running, one particular spot on the downs where four grass 
tracks separate east, west, south and north, from a tall, 
weathered sign-post, and the " red-capped town " of 
Marlborough, where he was at school — ^these images 
return and return, ever freshly applied ; but there is no 

1 Marlborough and Other Verses, etc. C. H. Sorley. Cambridge 
University Press. Quotations by permission of Professor W. R. 
Sorley. 

55 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

hint of the neighbouring Savernake forest, it had too 
much the character of hostihty to free movement. This 
young mind runs tirelessly, with ever revived pleasure, 
through an open wet bleak grey land, as once the boy 
clad only in jersey and shorts raced over the dim downs 
cloaked in rain. 

THE SONG OF THE UNGIRT RUNNERS 

We swing ungirded hips, 
And lightened are our eyes, 
The rain is on our lips, 
We do not run for prize, 
We know not whom we trust 
Nor whitherward we fare, 
But we run because we must 
Through the great wide air. 

The waters of the seas 
Are troubled as by storm. 
The tempest strips the trees 
And does not leave them warm. 
Does the tearing tempest pause ? 
Do the tree-tops ask it why ? 
So we run without a cause 
'Neath the big bare sky. 

The rain is on our lips, 
We do not run for prize. 
But the storm the water whips 
And the wave howls to the skies. 
The winds arise and strike it 
And scatter it like sand. 
And we run because we like it 
Through the broad bright land. 

The felicity here is of the rarest and finest kind, and 
shapes the main form and rhythm ; their inevitability 
sweeps us away and convinces, in spite of no matter what 
predisposition to stickle over details. 



I 



SORLEY 



The downs have another hold on this poet ; not only 
are they good to course at a long swinging run, they have 
preserved huge stones, earthworks and chiselled flints 
that tell of prehistoric lives. 

STONES 

This field is almost white with stones 
That cumber all its thirsty crust. 
And underneath, I know, are bones 
And all around is death and dust. 

O, in these bleached and buried bones 
Was neither love nor faith nor thought. 

But like the wind in this bleak place 
Bitter and bleak and sharp they grew, 
And bitterly they ran their race, 
A brutal bad unkindly crew : 

Souls like the dry earth, hearts like stone. 
Brains like the barren bramble-tree. 
Stern, sterile, senseless, mute, unknown — 
But bold, O, bolder far than we ! 

Against this wet, bleak, strenuous background of his 
predilection the young man's thought is astonishingly 
keen, fresh and mature. 

" I," he says in the title poem, Marlborough, 

" Have had my moments there, when I have been 
Unwittingly aware of something more. 
Some beautiful aspect, that I had seen 
With mute unspeculative eyes before ; 

Have had my times, when, though the earth did wear 
Her self- same trees and grasses, I could see 
The revelation that is always there. 
But somehow is not always clear to me." 

Here he introduces as an image *' Jacob's return from 
exile," and ends it : 

57 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

" For God had wrestled with him, and was gone. 
He looked around, and only God remained. 
The dawn, the desert, he and God were one. 
— And Esau came to meet him travel- stained. 

So, there, when simset made the downs look new 
And earth gave up her colours to the sky. 
And far away the little city grew 
Half into sight, new-visioned was my eye. 

I, who have lived, and trod her lovely earth. 
Raced with her winds and listened to her birds. 
Have cared but little for their worldly worth 
Nor sought to put my passion into words. 

But now it's different ; and I have no rest 
Because my hand must search, dissect and spell 
The beauty that is better not expressed. 
The thing that all can feel, but none can tell." 

Words halt behind thought and feeling. After vision 
and inspiration have been aroused by experience, even 
the best poetry may seem lame. But Sorley was con- 
scious of another reason why " Beauty is better not 
expressed." He knew that it would not be welcomed. 
He had reached that stage when the soul reacts against 
parents, masters and the world that has fostered it. He 
was a rebel, an unusually clear-eyed and affectionate 
rebel, who did not only feel that things were wrong, but 
could point them out with un unerring finger. 

" O come and see, it's such a sight. 
So many boys all doing right : 
To see them underneath the yoke, 
Blindfolded by the elder folk. 
Move at a most impressive rate 
Along the way that is called straight. 
O, it is comforting to know 
They're in the way they ought to go. 

58 



SORLEY 

But don't you think it's far more gay 
To see them slowly leave the way 
And limp and lose themselves and fall ? 
O, that's the nicest thing of all. 
I love to see this sight, for then 
I know they are becoming men, 
And they are tiring of the shrine 
Where things are really not divine. 

I do not know if it seems brave 

The youthful spirit to enslave, 

And hedge about lest it should grow. 

I don't kQow if it's better so 

In the long end. I only know 

That when I have a son of mine. 

He shan't be made to droop and pine, 

Bound down and forced by rule and rod 

To serve a God who is no God. 

But I'll put custom on the shelf 

And make him find his God himself. 

Perhaps he'll find Him in a tree 

Some hollow trunk, where you can see. 

Perhaps the daisies in the sod 

Will open out and show him God. 

Or will he meet him in the roar 

Of breakers as they beat the shore ? 

Or in the spiky stars that shine ? 

Or in the rain (where I foimd mine) ? 

Or in the city's giant moan ? 

— A God who will be all his own, 

To whom he can address a prayer 

And love him for he is so fair. 

And see with eyes that are not dim 

And build a temple meet for him." 

Yes, the actual world is more hospitable and more 
inspiring than the scenery, the panorama that English 
conventions paint and hang round the young, in part to 
help and prepare them, but in part also to delude them 
and disguise our own fears and failures. Truth provides 
a roomier house than the average Englishman has hired 

59 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

for his boys. Yet Sorley knew and felt that he had been 
unusually lucky in this respect. After leaving school he 
went to Germany for some months, and loved the life he 
saw in Mecklenberg Schwerin. He was reading the 
Odyssey, no longer one hundred lines at a time, but for his 
own pleasure, in long draughts, and was struck by the 
resemblance of the life he found about him, in that foreign 
place, to that he was reading about. He saw many 
things in Germany that were wrong, but it seemed to him 
that, as a nation, they had something to live for, while the 
English had struck him as lacking an adequate goal for 
effort. War was declared and he had to hurry across 
the frontier. In Cologne station he notes the various 
attitudes of the nationalities : Americans in a bustle for 
themselves ; Germans in a bustle too, but for the Father- 
land ; " dark uprooted Italians peering from a squeaking 
truck — ^like Cassandra from the backmost car looking 
steadily down on Agamemnon." He was gazetted 2nd 
Lieutenant before August was out, and by December he 
writes : 



LOST 

Across my past imaginings 

Has dropped a blindness silent and slow. 

My eye is bent on other things 

Than those it once did see and know. 



I may not think on those dear lands 
(O far away and long ago !) 
Where the old battered signpost stands 
And silently the four roads go 

East, west, south and north, 
And the cold winter winds do blow. 
And what the evening will bring forth 
Is not for me nor you to know. 

60 



SORLEY 

Yet outwardly he was not at all " lost " in camp life, 
but held his own, was popular and successful, and did not 
know what ill health was. Promoted to a lieutenancy in 
November, 1914, he crossed to France in the following 
May, and was gazetted Captain in August, 1915, being 
killed near Hulloch on October the 13th that same year. 

Once he wrote home wondering what kind of life he 
would take up after the war : 

*' Sorley is Gaelic for Wanderer. I have had a con- 
ventional education ; Oxford would have corked it. But 
this (the war) has freed the spirit, glory be ! " 

Many, many must have felt freed from the tyranny of 
England by the mere fact of fighting for her against the 
tyranny of Germany. The tyranny of peace in half-baked 
countries like those we know, though less apparent than 
the tyranny of war, was perhaps more deadly to spiritual 
freedom ; no Government yet established has deserved im- 
munity from attack either from without or from within ; 
that their constitutions should change smoothly and, if it 
may be, swiftly is the one possible hope for them all. 

Much later Sorley writes : 

" I am now beginning to think that free-thinkers should 
give their minds into subjection ; for we, who have given 
our actions and volitions into subjection, gain such 
marvellous rest thereby. Only of course it is the sub- 
jecting of their powers of will and deed to a wrong master, 
on the part of a great nation, that has led Europe into 
war. Perhaps afterwards I and my likes will again 
become indiscriminate rebels. For the present, we find 
high relief in making ourselves soldiers." 

No subjection can be wholesome and no master right 
for long. We must be freed in order to subject ourselves 
to better rules. No adequate rule has yet been conceived, 
even by the finest conscience. From prison to prison, or 
rather from enlargement to enlargement, men must 
advance or stagnate and die. 

61 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

There was no black and white brutally juxtaposed in 
his vision of the European War ; he was shocked to find 
so many, like Vernede, imbued with this childishly simple 
sense of utter contrast between the Allies and the Germans, 
and he seeks refuge with one correspondent, to whom he 
can safely put in a plea for a more rational view of the 
enemy. 

"So it seems to me that Germany's only fault — ^is a 
lack of real insight and sympathy with those who differ 
from her. We are not fighting a bully, but a bigot. They 
are a young nation, and don't see that what they consider 
is being done for the good of the world may be really 
being done "for self-gratification — like X, who, under 
pretence of informing the form, dropped into the habit 
of parading his own knowledge. X incidentally did the 
form a service by creating great amusement for it ; and 
so is Germany incidentally doing the world a service 
(though not in the way it meant) by giving them some- 
thing to live and die for, which no country but Germany 
had before. If the bigot conquers, he will learn in time 
his mistaken methods (for it is only of the methods and 
not of the goal of Germany that one can disapprove) — 
just as the early Christian bigots conquered by bigotry 
and grew larger in sympathy and tolerance, after conquest 
I regard the war as one between sisters, between Martha 
and Mary, the efficient and intolerant against the casual 
and sympathetic. Each side has a virtue for which it 
is fighting, and each that virtue's supplementary vice. 
I hope that whatever the material result of the conflict, 
it will purge these two virtues of their vices, and efficiency 
and tolerance will no longer be incompatible. But I 
think that tolerance is the larger virtue of the two, and 
efficiency must be her servant. So I am quite glad to 
fight against this rebellious servant. In fact I look at 
it this way. Suppose my platoon were the world. Then 
my platoon sergeant would represent efficiency and I 

62 



I 



SORLEY 



would represent tolerance. And I always take the 
sternest measures to keep my platoon sergeant in check ! 
I fully appreciate the wisdom of the War Office when they 
put inefficient officers to rule sergeants. . . . But I've 
seen the Fatherland (I like to call it the Fatherland, for 
in many families papa represents efficiency and mama 
tolerance — but don't think I'm W.S.P.U.) so horribly 
misrepresented that I've been burning to put in my case 
for them to a sympathetic ear." 

And he strikes the same note, in some ways more 
profoundly, in verse : 

TO GERMANY 

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed, 

And no man claimed the conquest of your land. 

But gropers both, through fields of thought confined, 

We stumble and we do not understand. 

You only saw your future bigly planned, 

And we the tapering paths of our own mind. 

And in each other's dearest ways we stand. 

And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind. 

When it is peace, then we may view again 

With new-won eyes each other's truer form 

And wonder. Grown more loving- kind and warm 

We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain, 

When it is peace. But until peace, the storm 

The darkness and the thunder and the rain. 

This, like the other poems I have quoted, has a fine 
movement ; and though at the outset the phrasing is not 
felicitous, it improves till it becomes worthy of the mean- 
ing in the last three lines. Then, too, what wise, kindly 
eyes this young fellow sees with ; how many of us can be 
put to shame by such a gentle sanity ! His discoveries 
about his own countrymen are no less persuasively 
illuminating. 

" One has fairly good chances of observing the life of 

63 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

the barrack-room, and what a contrast to the Hfe of a 
house in a public school ! The system is roughly the 
same ; the house-master or platoon commander entrusts 
the discipline of his charge to prefects or corporals, as the 
case may be. They never open their mouths in the 
barrack-room without the introduction of the unprintable 
swear-words and epithets ; they have absolutely no 
' morality ' (in the narrower, generally accepted sense) ; 
yet the Public School boy should live among them to learn 
a little Christianity ; for they are so extraordinarily nice 
to one another. They live in and for the present : we in 
and for the future. So they are cheerful and charitable 
always : and we often niggardly and unkind and spiteful. 
In the gymnasium at Marlborough, how the few clumsy 
specimens are ragged and despised and jeered at by the 
rest of the squad ; in the gyronasium here you should 
hear the sounding cheer given to a man who has tried for 
eight weeks to make a long jump of eight feet, and at last, 
by the advice and assistance of others, has succeeded. 
They seem instinctively to regard a man singly, at his own 
rate, by his own standards and possibilities, not in com- 
parison with themselves or others ; that is why they are 
so far ahead of us in their treatment and sizing up of 
others." 

Because they need servants, and because fine houses 
and rapid locomotion imply labour, the well-to-do tend to 
regard other kinds of people as existing for their con- 
venience. In this notion they resemble the enemy, who 
thought other nations were there that Germany might be 
"iiberalles." 

Sorley was very sensitive to the falseness and unfairness 
of this seductive outlook, and perceived how detrimental 
it is to the finer powers of those who indulge in it. He 
felt that even poets were too content to think of others 
as mere readers and admirers, and addresses to them a 
protest on behalf of less articulate souls : 
64 



SORLEY 



TO POETS 



We are the homeless, even as you, 

Who hope and never can begin. 

Our hearts are wounded through and through 

Like yours, but our hearts bleed within. 

We too make music, but our tones 

'Scape not the barrier of our bones. 

We have no comeliness like you. 
We toil, unlovely, and we spin, 
We start, return : we wind, imdo : 
We hope, we err, we strive, we sin. 
We love : your love's not greater, but 
The lips of our love's might stay shut. 
We have the evil spirits too 
That shake our soul with battle-din. 
But we have an eviller spirit than you, 
We have a dumb spirit within : 
The exceeding bitter agony 
But not the exceeding bitter cry. 

Here are shapeliness and vigour once more and, though 
finish and colour are to seek, there is still a marked im- 
provement as the end comes in view. 

Like other soldier poets, Sorley is anxious to think well 
of Death, whom he addresses : 

I. 

Saints have adored the lofty soul of you. 
Poets have whitened at your high renown. 
We stand among the many millions who 
Do hourly wait to pass yoiu' pathway down. 
You, so familiar, once were strange : we tried 
To live as of your presence unaware. 
But now in every road, on every side. 
We see your straight and steadfast signpost here. 
I think it like that signpost in my land. 
Hoary and tall, which pointed me to go 

E 65 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

Upward, into the Hills, on the right hand, 

Where the mists swim and the winds shriek and blow, 

A homeless land and friendless, but a land 

I did not know and that I wished to know. 

II. 

Such, such is Death : no triumph : no defeat : 
Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean, 
A merciful putting away of what has been. 

And this we know : Death is not Life effete, 

Life crushed, the broken pail. We who have seen 

So marvellous things know well the end not yet. 

Victor and vanquished are a-one in death : 

Coward and brave : friend, foe. Ghosts do not say 

" Come, what was your record when you drew your 

breath ? " 
But a big blot has hid each yesterday 
So poor, so manifestly incomplete. 
And your bright Promise withered long and sped, 
Is touched, stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet 
And blossoms and is you, when you are dead. 

These sonnets cannot compare for beauty and adequacy 
with Brooke's best, but the thought in them is perhaps 
even less expected, if not so certainly true. For us at 
least his promise is Sorley, now that he is dead. Death 
tempts us, nay forces us to overrate his actual production, 
and Reason in vain points out that the strait limits of his 
sensuous joys in image and language suggest that his 
poetical vein might have soon run dry. Yet not before 
he had enriched us, like another Matthew Arnold, with 
some equivalent for Empedocles, Sohrab and Rustum 
and The Scholar Gipsy, we retort. The power which 
shapes a masterpiece includes that which matures the man 
of the world, and that which renders the critic accom- 
plished. Youth binds these and the other tacts and 
aptitudes in a solid faggot, but after a time there is 

66 



SORLEY 

possibly more gain than loss, should life cut the cord and 
use the sticks singly. Then, perhaps, engrossed by 
political reform, the poet's soul may be felt as an agent 
and no longer by its cohesion provoke the echo, beauty 
from stony world. Death has settled that, and for many 
minds, when Wordsworth's hare is watched, racing on the 
moors while that mist raised by her feet from the wet turf 
runs with her, a boy will soon appear accompanied with a 
sweeping veil of rain coursing the same uplands. And 
when the elder poet has listened to the old leech-gatherer 
standing in the pool, he will turn to welcome wisdom from 
young rain-brightened lips as Sorley draws to a halt at 
his side, to wonder over prehistoric men or speak gener- 
ously of those of to-day and to morrow. His is but a 
continuation of Wordsworth's theme ; for as the dignity 
of individuals depends on their resolute independence, so 
that dignity alone renders a social amalgam feasible. A 
nation is not fused by these sacrificing and exploiting 
those, but by all devoting and employing themselves, 
and no man has a chance of doing this till he is a free 
agent. Nations, too, can only build a civilised world by 
respecting each other's independence, and the downfall 
of Germany shows how little efficiency can atone for 
the wish to domineer. Efficiency is fine, but kindness is 
beautiful, and beauty is as strong as light, far stronger 
than any palpable thing ; and in the long run it will 
prove to be the only rightful ruler. All other principles 
need to resort to force, but for beauty vision will win 
allegiance, so soon as the smoke of strife and commerce is 
out of men's eyes. 



67 



FRANCIS LEDWIDGE 

Francis Ledwidge/ as a poet, is the complement of 
Sorley ; each brings us what the other lacks. Ledwidge 
has no constructive power, and the impetus of his 
cadences rarely carries him satisfactorily through even a 
short poem, whereas Sorley's rode on unchecked by weak 
lines and poor phrasing. Our new poet's language is, on 
the other hand, often over-poetical, and his images some- 
times fantastically dazzling — an excess of the quality 
which critics perceive most easily and welcome most 
widely ! And a vivid coloured flash on its surface is an 
important element in great verse. Lord Dunsany, who 
introduces Ledwidge to the public, tells us that he was 
born a peasant in Meath and tried once to assist a Dublin 
grocer. But cities cannot cage these wild souls, home 
memories inveigle, the country lures, 

" And wondrous impudently sweet, 
Half of him passion, half conceit, 
The blackbird calls adown the street 
Like the piper of Hamelin." 

And the lad of sixteen who had written this "walked 
home one night a distance of thirty miles." 

Since the war he had become a corporal in the regiment 
in which Lord Dunsany was a captain, and had travelled 
to Greece and Egypt. This preface likens him to John 
Clare, our English pauper poet, of one hundred years ago, 
whose life among a nation of shopkeepers is the saddest 
idyll ; and even to-day I fancy that Ledwidge might 
have been congratulated on his birth the other side of St 
George's Channel, among people more patient with and 
more appreciative of poets. John Clare's poems were a 

* Songs of the Fields. By Francis Ledwidge. Herbert Jenkins. 
1915. Songs of Peace. By Francis Ledwidge. Herbert Jenkins. 
1917. Quotations by permission of Herbert Jenkins, Esq., and Lord 
Dunsany. 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

series of delights over detail, grouped more or less as in 
nature by locality and season, yet rarely, if ever, shaped 
into a poetic whole. Ledwidge's verse stores details too, 
but they are less varied and less realistic, though better 
transmuted by his moods, for he is moved even more by 
the image that caps the perception than by the thing 
perceived. As a poet, at least, he too lived in a dream 
not yet articulated by reason and purpose. And one is 
tempted, though one has no right, to suppose that his life 
also may have had something of the ineffectual simplicity 
of John Clare's. His rhymes are related to those of Mr 
Yeats and the minor Irish poets of to-day, as Clare's were 
to Keats', Wordsworth's and Cowper's, and I think this 
is all that can be really meant when he has been praised 
for style. Irish work may often seem to have more style 
than English, even when it is far weaker in the funda- 
mental qualities of great literature. Dominant moods 
give it a singleness and independence of outlook which 
condones the absence of complexity in emotion and of 
balance in intellectual grasp, 

THE SISTER 

I SAW the little quiet town, 
And the whitewashed gables on the hill, 
And laughing children coming down 
The laneway to the mill. 

Wind-blushes up their faces glowed, 
And they were happy as could be, 
The wobbling water never flowed 
So merry and so free. 

One little maid withdrew aside 
To pick a pebble from the sands. 
Her golden hair was long and wide. 
And there were dimples on her hands. 

70 



FRANCIS LEDWIDGE 

And when I saw her large blue eyes, 
What was the pain that went through me ? 
Why did I think on Southern skies 
And ships upon the sea ? 

I think this is as near as Ledwidge ever comes to 
organic perfection, though two freaks of phrasing fleck its 
very real beauty and success. 

" And Gwydion said to Math, when it was Spring : 
' Come now and let us make a wife for Llew.' 
And so they broke broad boughs yet moist with dew 
And in a shadow made a perfect ring : 
They took the violet and the meadow-sweet 
To form her pretty face, and for her feet 
They built a mound of daisies on a wing, 
And for her voice they made a linnet sing 
In the wide poppy blowing for her mouth. 
And over all they chanted twenty hours. 
And Llew came singing from the azure south 
And bore away his wife of birds and flowers." 

If the success of this is smoother, there is to my mind a 
suspicion of the happy moment of a professor of poetry in 
its well-worn theme and the refurbished stock images of 
the Celtic Muse. The Death of Aillil, the most successful 
of his attempts at narrative, fails for me in the same way. 
Songs of the Fields, his first volume, rewards the reader far 
better than Songs of Peace, in good part written since the 
war began. Yet his soldiering in Greece gives us this : 

THE HOME-COMING OF THE SHEEP 

The sheep are coming home in Greece, 
Hark the bells on every hill ! 
Flock by flock, and fleece by fleece, 
Wandering wide a little piece 
Thro' the evening red and still, 
Stopping where the pathways cease, 
Cropping with a hurried will. 

71 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

Thro' the cotton bushes low 
Merry boys with shouldered crooks 
Close them in a single row, 
Shout among them as they go 
With one bell-ring o'er the brooks. 
Such delight you never know 
Reading it from gilded books. . . . 

The fourth line is quite as inadequate as some of Sorley's 
most careless, but the poem is exquisite ; only in the book 
the picture and mood are weakened by an additional 
stanza. 

His movements are more sustainedly happy in less 
original work, which is an indication that he had it in him 
to surpass what now remains his best. 

" I often look when the moon is low 
Thro' that other window on the wall. 
At a land all beautiful under snow, 
Blotted with shadows that come and go 
When the winds rise up and fall. 
And the form of a beautiful maid 
In the white silence stands 
And beckons me with her hands. ..." 

The trouble produced by a soldier's life in such a mind 
accounts for the comparative poverty of the second book, 
rather than any failure of impulse or resource. Neither 
book is so much a collection of poems as a store-house of 
lines, phrases and images, with here a cadence caught and 
lost, there a striking thought — choice things, but rarely 
mounted to advantage, rather, to use his own words, like 

" . . . an apron full of jewels 
The dewy cobweb swings." 

Here are others : and you might have as many again, 
were there space to quote them : 

" The large moon rose up queenly as a flower 
Charmed by some Indian pipes." 

72 



I 

JP FRANCIS LEDWIDGE 

** And all we learn but shows we know the less." 

" When the wind passing took your scattered hair 
And flung it like a brown shower in my face." 

" Within the oak a throb of pigeon wings." 

" And the blue 
Of hiding violets, watching for your face, 
Listen for you in every dusky place." 

" The moon had won 
Her way above the woods, with her small star 
, Behind her like the cuckoo's little mother. ..." 

" The bees are holding levees in the flowers." 

" Day hangs its light between two dusks, my heart, 
Always beyond the dark there is the blue. 
Some time we'll leave the dark, myself and you, 
And revel in the light for evermore. 
• • . . • • » • 

But in the dark your beauty shall be strong. 

Pigeons are home. Day droops — the fields are cold. 
Now a slow wind comes labouring up the sky 
With a small cloud long steeped in sunset gold. 
Like Jason with the precious fleece anigh 
The harbour of lolcos. Day's bright eye 
Is filmed with the twilight, and the rill 
Shines like a scimitar upon the hill." 

These things are strung together with little apparent 
I connection except the rhymes, each poem's structure 
I being the pattern that these make. However, you could 
k glean felicities in such quantities from no other of these 
j Soldier Poets, not even from Brooke ; and note that this 
underlines Brooke's superiority ; his reflective and 
organic power makes more of fewer treasures. The best 

73 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

effect of reading Ledwidge is that which he describes in a 
poem dedicated to M. McG. (" Who came one day when 
we were all gloomy and cheered us with sad music "). 

" Old memories knocking at each heart 
Troubled us with the world's great lie : 
You sat a little way apart 
And made a fiddle cry. 

And rivers full of little lights 

Came down the fields of waving green : 

Our immemorial delights 

Stole in on us unseen." 

The delight with which a child first perceives beauty, 
though it be forgotten, must never be barred and shuttered 
from return into the mind by coarsening habit or hum- 
bling care. If this happens, the enchantment of poetry 
is powerless. And as Antaeus' strength was increased 
whenever his feet touched the earth, aesthetic power 
revives when these primordial joys return into the lofty 
buildings of a master mind ; and should these smiling 
visitors desert it finally, however noble the building, its 
charm grows cold ; so important is this love of particular 
things and particular aspect of things to the mind. This 
tenderness over detail means more to poetry and painting 
than the theorist easily allows. Though perceived as a 
flash on the surface, this is a pulse of health that, having 
made youth perfect, can recreate maturity and old age. 
Everything that exists is holy, or at least demonic, when 
seen as a new and solitary portent ; thus it appears first 
to the child, and must reappear to inspire the artist. 

In these small books, those whom the war has hurried 
too much and too long, and those whom it has deafened 
and sickened with evil sounds and evil sights, may find a 
well of refreshment suitable to a convalescent mood that 
has not the energy to appreciate more elegant, noble or 

74 






FRANCIS LEDWIDGE 



massive creations. Had he lived Ledwidge might very 
well have shown more constructive power than I seem to 
allow. He was still quite young when he was killed in 
Flanders ; and those finer things that his genius would 
have created when it was fully organised were lost 
for ever. The choice and subtle images which crown his 
perceptions so frequently are in themselves structures, 
just as the cells of the body are living organisms. As we 
have seen, Sorley stands quite alone in power to shape an 
inevitable whole at so early an age. The vision that rises 
for me as I read these Songs of the Fields is more like John 
Clare than it would be were my mind more capable of 
detecting the intimate difference of tissue in the liveliest 
productions of the two men. Still, though in him it were 
but a phase to outgrow, this temperament embodies 
before my eyes, as an inveterate way of life in which most 
poets have some share. Though the body it informs grow 
old, this does not age : young-eyed, it has wandered 
every land where an oral literature was cherished, a wel- 
come figure with the pathetic refinement of one who has 
mused much and yet lives destitute of creature comforts. 
His clothes have been new in regions far apart, though 
wear and weather have made them merely his, well-nigh 
obliterating fashions and colour. Watch, he stops on 
the hill road before a little fountain's trough which some 
herd-boy has banked round with turfs and stones, that a 
few sheep or a cow may drink the better ! He discerns in 
it more success than his own activity has compassed — an 
image of hopes he once owned. He kneels and, gazing 
into the limpid basin, sees not, like Narcissus, his own 
features, but most dear memories, moonrises and sunsets, 
wind-bent boughs, the calls of many birds, nodding 
flowers, children running, laughing and kissing — he sees 
and hears as he first saw and heard. From many poems 
the delight of other men's visions changes and inter- 
changes with these until he clears a mist from his eyes, for 

75 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

always before long he expects " a face full of smiles," a 
young woman's, always the same, though now the eyes 
are blue, now grey, now brown, though the hair curls or is 
smooth, though name after name seems to fit it, though 
blue jewels made from feathers crown it or coral from 
the sea, helmeted now in fur and now in mail, or white- 
capped like " a fairy hooded in one bell of the valley-lily," 
or, uncovered, with tresses that play with the wind. The 
eyes are always innocent, always welcoming, but so vari- 
ous that, despite a constant homeliness, it is a goddess's 
face — her laugh is heard wherever this or that in the 
world has pleased eye or ear of this wanderer, whose heart 
has remained young and fresh as that of a boy. And he, 
he forgets his life, forgets the stones and glinting mica silt 
that floor that limpid trough, forgets the grass of Par- 
nassus that he has set floating on it, and is where she is, 
while contentment fills him and that lonely place. 



76 



EDWARD THOMAS 

Edward Thomas had wandered over literature and 
England, and shaped a mind that, at first opinionated, 
had saddened and mellowed. In the end he became a 
poet and a soldier almost at the same time, and now is 
dead. His success in prose had always been middling, 
breeding further discontent ; do his poems ^ greatly 
succeed ? Every time I read them I like them better. 
Loh, his longest effort, was the first I saw ; it was 
perfectly dissociated from him by the assumed name of 
*' Eastaway " and appeared to me full of promise though 
unwieldy ; but in this collected volume his quahty does 
not strike me as like a young man's, but wily, artful and 
aware of many traps. 

" Rise up, rise up, 
And, as the trumpet blowing 
Chases the dreams of men. 
As the dawn glowing 
The stars that left unfit 
The land and water, 
Rise up and scatter 
The dew that covers 
The print of last night's lovers — 
Scatter it, scatter it ! 

While you are fistening 

To the clear horn, 

Forget, men, everything 

On this earth newborn. 

Except that it is lovelier 

Than any mysteries. 

Open your eyes to the air 
1 That has washed the eyes of the stars 
j Through all the dewy night : 

Up with the fight, 
I To the old wars ; 
1 Arise, arise ! " 

I ^ Poems by Edward Thomas. Selwyn & Blount. 3s. 6d. Quota- 
liious by permission of Mrs Edward Thomas. 

' 77 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

Though the impulse to write that was strong, it has 
constantly obeyed the bridle of keen literary taste, its 
grace is not like that of wild life, but like that of horse- 
manship, and will be the more admired the more fully the 
difficulties overcome are appreciated. In some of these 
poems novelty is sought as though felicity were despaired 
of, yet a few are really happy. Keats believed that 
felicities should so chime in with the human soul as to 
seem known before, even though a prenatal existence 
had to be supposed to justify that impression. Novelties 
in poetry fail if merely new. Mr Yeats has of late years 
set the fashion of skating across ever thinner ice until it 
seems almost miraculous that verse is not prose. You 
watch the skater as the surface warps under his swift 
passage, and expect that in another minute he will be in 
it, floundering like any Walt Whitman, but this does not 
happen. Rhyme is not discarded, but strained ; rhythms 
are not free, but licentious. Thomas shows this tendency 
in ways of his own, neither very determined nor very 
risky, yet sometimes annoying. These sleights of his 
are intended, like those of others, deftly to dazzle the 
most sophisticated judges, and in so far betray a greater 
preoccupation with manner than with matter — a fault of 
proportion. The creative mind considers the manner 
solely as the servant of the import and justness of its 
theme. Thomas knew life after a fashion that was not 
the fashion he had intended to discover it in. The 
passionate young man hawks for experience with his 
fancy, but the quarry brought to his feet is not always 
that at which he let his falcon fly. 

" ' He has robbed two clubs. The judge at Salisbury 
Can't give him more than he undoubtedly 
Deserves. The scoundrel ! Look at his photograph ! 
A lady-killer ! Hanging's too good by half 
For such as he.' So said the stranger, one 
With crimes yet undiscovered or undone. 

78 



EDWARD THOMAS 

But at the inn the Gipsy dame began : 

' Now he was what I call a gentleman. 

He went along with Carrie, and when she 

Had a baby he paid up so readily 

His half-a-crown. Just like him. A crown'd have been 

More like him. For I never knew him mean. 

Oh ! but he was such a nice gentleman. Oh ! 

Last time we met he said if me and Joe 

Was anywhere near we must be sure to call. 

He put his arms around our Amos all 

As if he were his own son. I pray God 

Save him from justice ! Nicer man never trod.' " 

This is the spirit of Borrow rather than that of 
Wordsworth. Yet I divine a hankering for spiritual 
intensity akin to that of the more central master. 
These poems drift across a profound hunger for ideal 
human relations ; like those floating gardens of Kashmir, 
they traverse an incommunicable want, as one of them 
says — 

" content and discontent 
As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings " 

— an acceptance of the encountered actuality far less 
cavalier than that of the Tinman's antagonist. Though 
Thomas had waved a flag like those who throw their 
energies into a movement, the comrades tramping by his 
side and following were heard like echoes making his 
foot's thud sound all the more lonely. That heraldic 
picture of Simple Life Returning blazoned on the banner 
seemed no truer to his vision than those unsubstantial 
reverberations multiplying the plod-plod of his two feet ; 
till he felt most solitary when agreement with him was 
most general. To adore remote places with quaint names 
became a fashion, but he retreated from prose to poetry 
in shy alarm. 

The country and simple lives have their beauty, but 

79 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

what is more obvious, they are picturesque, inventoried 
stage properties of well-worn appeal. This picturesque- 
ness deludes men after they have despaired of more ideal 
beauties, such as can only be recognised in particular 
cases by very rare souls. For Wordsworth, country folk 
were the matrix out of which an ideal life might yet be 
moulded ; his dearest thoughts and passionate aspirations 
rejoiced or suffered on their account. Deep country 
ancientness and Celtic magic had raised Thomas' en- 
thusiasm, but his mind did not unite with what it admired, 
and gradually felt undeceived, and this disillusionment 
was closer to reality than his infatuation had been. At a 
cross-roads he says : 

" I read the sign. Which way shall I go ? 
A voice says : ' You would not have doubted so 
At twenty.' Another voice gentle with scorn 
Says ; ' At twenty you wished you had never been born.' " 

Though doubtless minor disappointments intensified 
the feeling, in a general sense one would imagine that his 
birth vexed him because it had not befallen in a pastoral 
age, in Arcady, in Ireland when Cuchulain was about or in 
the Middle Ages when the oldest of existing barns was 
building. This soul, we say as we read, must have chafed 
against modern circumstance. Union with nature, be- 
tween man and the most essential conditions of his life, 
such as that supposed to have been achieved in far-off 
times and places, has a true ideal value ; it does corre- 
spond to a profound and rational aspiration. Honour 
then to its at times quaint and perverse expression ! But 
observant eyes see more than they look for. And Thomas, 
who took pains to visit and know the most untouched 
parts of England and Wales, and who drank to the dregs 
the considerable literature which can feed such curiosity, 
though he still loved nature, was undeceived about man 

80 



EDWARD THOMAS 

and, as a corollary, about himself. It dawned upon him 
that man's need is nobler impulses rather than choicer 
circumstances, that the soul seeks a mood and should not 
be put off with hopes and desires, for we can only possess 
that which we can truly appreciate. 

" When we two walked in Lent 
We imagined that happiness 
Was something different 
And this was something less. 

But happy were we to hide 
Our happiness, not as they were 
Who acted in their pride 
Juno and Jupiter : 

For the Gods in their jealousy 
Murdered that wife and man. 
And we that were wise live free 
To recall our happiness then." 

Thus many men and women look back at a full- 
illusioned youth with something of envy, and yet with a 
sense of freedom at the thought that those headstrong 
young people are really dead, which allows them to smile 
with the world, not in scorn of it, to be tender and kind 
instead of passionate and self-absorbed. Freedom from 
that fervid seriousness permits humorous playfulness, 
permits a vital possession of our own scorned past, and has 
gentle acceptance for the stream of shortcoming which is 
daily life. 

" If every hour 
Like this one passing that I have spent among 
The wiser others when I have forgot 
To wonder whether I was free or not, 
Were piled before me, and not lost behind, 
And I could take and carry them away 
I should be rich ; or if I had the power 
To wipe out every one and not again 
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor 
And yet I still am half in love with pain. ..." 

F 81 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

What a contrast to Wordsworth, who always looked 
back to his youth as freshly arrived from heaven, and 
wished to bind maturity and age to it by conscious piety. 
He had been born free ; Thomas achieved freedom at the 
cost of disillusionment ; yet it was part of his latter-day 
riches that he had been so deceived long ago. Better so, 
than to have been without fire, than to have been dull, 
torpid and mean. Yes, yes ; but not better than to have 
been a creative artist, thrilling and anguishing about work 
that was more important than the workman. But with 
freedom came the inspired moods at last, and prose gave 
way to poetry. This wanderer's vision had much in 
common with Ledwidge's vivid aptness of particular 
images and Clare's limpid sight. 



"While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough 
With spangles of the morning's storm drop down 
Because the starling shakes it." 

" The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow 
As if the bow had flown off with the arrow." 

" Like the touch of rain she was 
On a man's flesh and hair and eyes." 

" November's earth is dirty ... 
And the prettiest things on the ground are the paths 
With morning and evening hobnails dinted. 
With foot and wing-tip overprinted 
Or separately charactered 
Of little beast and little bird." 



Such things must always make a poet supremely happy 
at whatever stage of life they may be written. And 
where there is simple joy, playfulness and tenderness will 
find room. | 

82 ' 



EDWARD THOMAS 

" If I should ever by chance grow rich 
I'll buy Codham, Cockridden and Childerditch, 
Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater, 
And let them all to my elder daughter. 
The rent I shall ask of her will be only 
Each year's first violets, white and lonely, 
The first primroses and orchises — 
She must find them before I do, that is. 
But if she finds a blossom on furze 
Without rent they shall for ever be hers, 
Codham, Cockridden and Childerditch, 
Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater — 
I shall give them all to my elder daughter." 

And to his wife — 

" And you, Helen, what should I give you ? 
So many things I would give you 
Had I an infinite great store 
Offered me and I stood before 
To choose. I would give you youth. 
All kinds of loveliness and truth, 
A clear eye as good as mine. 
Lands, waters, flowers, wine. 
As many children as your heart 
Might wish for, a far better art 
Than mine can be, all you have lost 
Upon the travelling waters tossed. 
Or given to me. If I could choose 
Freely in that great treasure-house 
Anything from any shelf, 
I would give you back yourself, 
And power to discriminate 
What you want and want it not too late, 
Many fair days free from care 
And heart to enjoy both foul and fair. 
And myself, too, if I could find 
Where it lay hidden and it proved kind." 

The Muse rarely lays her hand for the first time on a 
man in his late thirties, and when this happens we ought 
not to be surprised if he proves himself a considerable 

83 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

poet with complex and subtle moods. Thomas in this 
thin volume ranges from mere impressionism to creation 
as exquisite as this : 

" The clouds that are so light, 
Beautiful, swift and bright. 
Cast shadows on field and park 
Of the earth that is so dark. 

And even so now, light one ! 
Beautiful, swift and bright one ! 
You let fall on a heart that was dark, 
Unillumined, a deeper mark. 

But clouds would have, without earth 
,, To shadow, far less worth : 
Away from your shadow on me 
Your beauty less would be. 

And if it still be treasured 
An age hence, it shall be measured 
By this small dark spot 
Without which it were not." 

A really finished and lovely poem, which will improve 
with long pondering and often repeating. This man had 
fought for his own freedom and won against considerable 
odds before he went out to fight for ours. Through his 
art, as under limpid water, one sees the opinionated savage 
youngster whom he first was, lying drowned, exclusive in 
his love of Celtic magic and deep-country ancientness, 
despising many fine things because he associated them 
with towns and globe-trotters ; but the real man's soul 
with its depth and stillness has charmed all that turbu- 
lence, so that it now lies like a picture of itself under 
glass. Not born free, but self -freed like a plant that lifts 
a stone, or a sapling that splits a rock before it can show 
the world its proper beauty, and, for us discovered, like 
that hooded wayfarer at the supper-table only recognised 
84 



EDWARD THOMAS 

after he has vanished, as better than our kindest thoughts 
had dared suppose. Our house was not well ordered, he 
should not have had to write hastily for his own and his 
children's bread, we have lost the chance of using him to 
the best advantage ; yet he leaves us more than we 
deserved, something that will be treasured by posterity 
for ever. As his body fell, its cloak melted off the soul 
and we caught a glimpse which confounded our poor 
recollections of the man, and words of his still tolling 
round our ears make us aware that for him this dark 
casualty had a different meaning. 

" Here love ends. 
Despair, ambition ends, 
All pleasure and all trouble, 
Although most sweet or bitter. 
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter 
Than tasks most noble. 

There is not any book 

Or face of dearest look 

That I would not turn from now 

To go into the unknown 

I must enter and leave alone 

I know not how. 

The tall forest towers ; 
Its cloudy foliage lowers 
Ahead, shelf above shelf ; 
Its silence I hear and obey 
That I may lose my way 
And myself." 



85 



F. W. HARVEY 

" Flower-like and shy 
You stand, sweet mortal, at the river's brim : 
With what unconscious grace 
Your hmbs to some strange law surrendering 
Which lifts you clear of our humanity ! 

Now would I sacrifice 

Your breathing, warmth, and all the strange romance 

Of living to a moment ! Ere you break 

The greater thing than you, I would my eyes 

Were basilisk to turn you to a stone. 

So should you be the world's inheritance, 

And souls of unborn men should draw their breath 

From mortal you, immortalised in Death." ^ 

Human beauty, that "greater thing than you," 
haunts mankind. Its complex attraction maddens not 
only saints and artists but every honest heart. To arrest 
it, to keep it steadily in view is our greatest need, yet like 
the wind it is here and is gone. Having moved men like 
a hurricane to prove by devastation that their race or 
their religion is its chosen vehicle, it will be content to 
fondle a child with caressing indulgence, turning her self- 
will ''to favour and to prettiness." Generations have 
sought to mew it in a sentence, to immortalise it as the 
memory of a man or the record of a god's visit. Some 
have claimed that only perfect form could express it, 
while others find eloquent a " visage more marred than 
that of any man," capable of suffering a greater persecu- 
tion than any other creature. The notion that this 
revelation may wholly possess one of ourselves, one who 
may stand emptied of it like a vacant house an hour 
hence, is old and beautiful. Yes, one lovely moment of a 

1 " Gloucestershire Friends. By Lieutenant F. W. Harvey. Sidgwick 
& Jackson Ltd. 2s. 6d. Quotations by permission of Mrs Harvey 
and of Bishop Frodsham. 

87 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

single life may have uttered what millions of completed 
lives have stammered over unintelligibly ; this thought 
begets that agony of fondness that would entrust the 
brief perfection of young persons to stone or metal rather 
than leave it to fading flesh. Elroy Flecker, a young 
poet recently dead, rivals the beautiful lines quoted 
above with a similar invention : 

" Had I the power 
To Midas given of old 
To touch a flower 
And leave its petals gold, 
I then might touch thy face, 
Delightful boy. 
And leave a metal grace 
A graven joy. 

Thus would I slay — 
Ah, desperate device ! 
The vital day 

That trembles in thine eyes. 
And let the red lips close 
Which sang so well 
And drive away the rose 
To leave a shell." 

This vivid estimation of human beauty is proof of a 
deep well of poetic power. 

" Star of my soul, thou gazest 
Upon the starry skies ; 
I envy Heaven, that watches 
Thy face with countless eyes." ^ 

So Plato sang, and still, in spite of astronomy ; the 
worth of this soul-thrilled comeliness can counterbalance 
the magnitude of stellar regions and remove all terror 
from the unclouded night. So great a power has human 
beauty when we are alone with ourselves ; and yet few 

\ 1 Translated by Kenneth Freeman : Schools of Hellas. 

88 



F. W. HARVEY 

ideas have had less weight in councils of war and' 
parliaments of peace. Commerce has been permitted 
to oppress and ambition to outrage it to any extent. 

But let us return to the poem I first cited. Lieutenant 
Harvey, who won the D.C.M. as lance-corporal, was 
allowed by the German authorities to send it and a little 
volume of others home from the prison camp at Giitersloh. 
Many judges would not admit that his poem is a rival 
to Flecker's, and the last couplet does weaken its effect ; 
but then Flecker weakened his by two stanzas which I 
have not quoted. Lt. Harvey's volume gives proof of 
a varied and powerful soul ; but it peeps at us from a 
prison of trivial amusement, banal tricks and rhymes, 
things that Flecker was all his short poet-life at conscious 
war with, staving them further and further back from his 
small garden of verse ; whereas Harvey hardly seems 
conscious that they confine and baffle the wings of his 
Pegasus. The gleams of pure poetry that flash past the 
bars of his everyday mentality are not alone passages of 
felicity, but there are also fine inevitable poem-shapes, 
marred in execution — not so much, as in Sorley's case, 
from lack of time to finish; no, rather as though a 
strange, insensitive, surface-personality intervened and 
" gambolled from the matter " in repeating what had 
been conceived. When I first read his volume I said, 
" No, I cannot write about this man," and laid it aside for 
weeks ; then I happened to open it at the lines I have 
quoted and immediately began to search for other signs 
of power in the mass of smart or pretty trifles, and I 
found a few. He addresses a fallen comrade — 

" Swift-footed, fleeter yet 
Of heart. Swift to forget 

The petty spite that life or men could show you : 
Your last long race is won, 
But beyond the sound of gun 
You laugh and help men onward — if I know you." 

89 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

But we wonder whether he had himself heard the rhythm 
of the first three lines when we next read — 

" O still you laugh and walk 
And sing and frankly talk." 

A doubt arises even over the second three lines — ^the 
fatal influence of a trick of facile rhyming seems already 
to tame in them the soaring stroke — but with this last 
couplet we are waddling on ground. 

" What is it the breeze says 
In London streets to-day 
Unto the troubled trees 
Whose shadows strew the way, 
Whose leaves are all a-flutter ? 

' You are wild ! ' the rascal cries. 
The green tree beats its wings 
And fills the air with sighs. 
' Wild ! wild ! ' the rascal sings. 
But your feet are in the gutter ! 

Men pass beneath the trees 
Walking the pavement grey, 
They hear the whisperings tease 
And at the word he utters 
Their hearts are green and gay. 

Then like the gay, green trees. 
They beat proud wings to fly. 
But like the fluttering trees, 
Their footprints mark the gutters 
Until the beggars die." 

This poem has great beauty of structure ; it follows an 
inevitable course from outstart to the happy last line. 
Yet the first line for the sake of a pat rhyme is contorted 
and rendered ambiguous to the ear and really runs — 

" What is it says the breeze " — 
90 



I 



F. W. HARVEY 

which seems to demand punctuation thus — 
'* ' What is it ? ' says the breeze "— 

whereas the sense is as I have amended it. Besides this, 
the two latter stanzas distinctly fall off in aptness of 
phrase as compared with the first two. 

The poems entitled Recognition and The Little Road 
and the first of the two Ballades are also not only truly 
inspired and well designed, but spoilt in similar ways. 
His interests and sentiments have perhaps a wider range 
than with most of these poets, and are almost all com- 
mendable and endearing, only it is expression makes 
the poet, and here the general effect is easy-going and 
commonplace. No doubt the facility with which he is 
amused by the first-coming features of his own work and 
of the world is a sign of youth, and makes his width of 
range the more promising. It is rare indeed to find in 
work, the general allure of which is so casual, lines so just, 
direct and impassioned as were the first five I quoted 
from him, moving with their own movement, imcontroUed 
by the conventional notions of form which are habitual 
with their author ; and they certainly should set expect- 
ancy on tiptoe for what he will produce during the next 
few years. Every honest heart is at moments maddened 
by a glimpse of beauty in behaviour or in persons : then 
their thought suddenly darts upward as though a robin 
were possessed by the soul of a lark. Was this such a 
moment, or are the other poems the tawdry swaddling 
of a still unconscious master ? Ability there is plenty of ; 
his mundane effectiveness may reach the level of Kipling's. 

" In general, if you want a man to do a dangerous job : — 
Say, swim the Channel, climb St Paul's, or break into and rob 
The Bank of England, why, you find his wages must be 

higher 
Than if you merely wanted him to light the kitchen fire. 
But in the British Army it's just the other way, 
And the maximimi of danger means the minimum of pay." 

91 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

Perhaps in the future all journalists may be trained to 
this degree of cunning, and then, perhaps before the end 
of time, they may sicken even the average man with 
smartness in verse. 

Strangest of all, this lover of beauty and this captive 
of momentary effect have been once at least fused con- 
sciously and inextricably in a single poem, a successful 
poem. 

THE BUGLER 

God dreamed a man ; 
Then, having firmly shut 
Life like a precious metal in his fist 
Withdrew, His labour done. Thus did begin 
Our various divinity and sin. 
For some to ploughshares did the metal twist, 
And others — dreaming empires — straightway cut 
Crowns for their aching foreheads. Others beat 
Long nails and heavy hammers for the feet 
Of their forgotten Lord. (Who dares to boast 
That he is guiltless ?) Others coined it : most 
Did with it — simply nothing. (Here again 
Who cries his innocence ?) Yet doth remain 
Metal unmarred, to each man more or less, 
Whereof to fashion perfect loveliness. 

For me, I do but bear within my hand 

(For sake of Him our Lord, now long forsaken) 

A simple bugle such as may awaken 

With one high morning note a drowsing man : 

That wheresoe'er within my motherland 

The sound may come, 'twill echo far and wide 

Like pipes of battle calling up a clan. 

Trumpeting men through beauty to God's side. 

Second thoughts are best, and this seems made entirely 
of first thoughts ; images, attitude, everything ; and yet it 
is inevitably shaped to a whole that is itself throughout. 
The mad passion for beauty can do so much even with 

92 



F. W. HARVEY 

cheap and hackneyed material. In the uncouth, though 
familiar, garb of crazy common-sense this young soldier 
stands among the crowd and blows his bugle, half con- 
scious of the drab disguise, half hoping it will fall and he 
find himself naked as Achilles ; and why should he not 
open his eyes and *' behold the mountain full of horses and 
chariots of fire " ? 



RICHARD ALDINGTON 

As the year nineteen hundred approached and was passed 
young men said : " We are the new century. How shall 
we differ from the old ? ' ' And elder folk said : " Of course 
the new century must be different ; let us try and welcome 
it." Young poets, who wish to prove that they are a new 
sort, embrace theories and think that these lend them 
importance ; obviously they have not produced enough 
work to claim the authority of masters, so they must 
needs borrow if they wish to impose. Unfortunately, 
theory descrbies art but cannot create. No work succeeds 
because it conforms to rules ; bad and good works alike 
exemplify the practice of all schools. 

The " Imagists " are one small twig of a branch of the 
new tree made by forking movements. They plead that 
they are not rebels, and point out how, at least in English, 
verse free from rhyme and conventional rhythms has 
always existed ; besides, they admire, nay worship, the 
past. None the less they pubHsh a manifesto, and prove 
their doctrine to be impressionistic. 

"The 'exact' word does not mean the word which 
exactly describes the object in itself, it means the ' exact ' 
word which brings the effect of that object before the 
reader as it presented itself to the poet's mind at the time 
of writing the poem." ^ 

The value of a poem cannot consist in informing us 
how a poet felt at a given moment ; it may tell us this, but 
its value will lie in the quality of his feeling and the 
felicity with which it takes shape. This form is a growth 
like other organisms. If, as it grows, the poet says, 
" But I did not feel like this or think of that when the 
impulse started me off ; I am adulterating my inspiration 
with afterthoughts," he checks and thwarts this growth, 

1 Some Imagist Poets. Constable & Co. 1915. Quotations by per- 
mission of Lieutenant Richard Aldington. 

95 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

and turns his work into a scientific document about how 
he once felt, which possibly has very little interest for 
science. 

The effect of this mistake is clearly seen in the triviality 
and poverty of many Imagist poems. But Nature takes 
no notice of creeds and sects and nicknames, and has 
given Richard Aldington such love of beauty as amounts 
almost to passion, and to H. D., his wife and compeer, 
such passion as must create beauty, despite no matter 
what crippling theory. There is, of course, no such thing 
as legitimate or illegitimate among aesthetic means and 
forms. Success in fulfilling its own nature is the sole 
criterion by which a poem should be judged. This happy 
couple are scholars as well as poets, and have contributed 
excellent work to The Poets' Translation Series. 

A lover of beauty is hurt every day in London, where 
ruthless commercialism has produced a hell almost as 
dreadful as that created by ruthless militarism in 
Flanders. Such a man feels and resents a nameless 
hostility, yet he may deem it a kind of desertion to take 
refuge in dreams of old Italy and ancient Greece. He 
wishes to be loyal to his own day even if it can only be by 
enlarging on his sufferings. 

WHITECHAPEL ^ 

Noise ! 

Iron hoofs, iron wheels, iron din 

Of drays and trams and feet passing ; 

Iron 

Beaten to a vast mad cacophony. 

In vain the shrill, far cry 

Of swallows sweeping by : - 4 

In vain the silence and green 

Of meadows Apriline ; 

In vain the clear white rain — 

^Images. Richard Aldington. The Poetry Bookshop. 

96 



RICHARD ALDINGTON 

Soot ; mud ; 

A nation maddened with labour ; 

Interminable collision of energies — - 

Iron beating upon iron, 

Smoke whirling upwards, 

Speechless, impotent. 

In vain the shrill, far cry 
Of kittiwakes that fly 
Where the sea waves leap green. 
The meadows Apriline — 

Noise, iron, smoke ; 
Iron, Iron, Iron. 

To my ear and understanding this is improved by the 
omission of lines 1, 11, 16, 21 and 22. Accumulations 
of nouns and adjectives are characteristic of imagists, 
in elegancies of syntax give much of their work the air of a 
translation, as though the difficulty of following a foreign 
idiom had overstrained the resources of the writer. 



PEOPLE 

Why should you try to crush me ? 
Am I so Christ-like ? 

You beat against me 

Immense waves, filthy with refuse. 

I am the last upright of a smashed breakwater, 

But you shall not crush me 

Though you bury me in foaming slime 

And hiss your hatred about me. 

You break over me, cover me ; 

I shudder at the contact ; 

Yet I pierce through you 

And stand up, torn, dripping, shaken. 

But whole and fierce. 

G 97 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

This is far better, but a true poet is rarely at his best in 
the expression of personal antagonism. Admiration and 
delight create beauty. 

"Like a gondola of green scented fruits 
Drifting along the dark canals at Venice, 
You, O exquisite one, 
Have entered my desolate city. 

The blue smoke leaps 
Like swirling clouds of birds vanishing. 
So my love leaps forth towards you. 
Vanishes and is renewed. 

The flower which the wind has shaken 
Is soon filled again with rain, 
So does my heart fill slowly with tears 
Until you return." 

Sensitive to beauty, yet a trifle over-ingenious ; let us 
sample him in a more objective mood. 



THE FAUN SEES SNOW FOR THE FIRST TIME 

Zeus, 

Brazen-thunder-hurler, 

Cloud- whirler, son-of-Kronos, 

Send vengeance on these Oreads 

Who strew 

White frozen flecks of mist and cloud 

Over the brown trees and the tufted grass 

Of the meadows, where the stream 

Runs black through shining banks 

Of bluish white. 

Zeus, 

Are the halls of heaven broken up 
That you flake down upon me 
Feather- strips of marble ? 

98 



RICHARD ALDINGTON 

Dis and Styx ! 

When I stamp my hoof 

The frozen- cloud- specks jam into the cleft 

So that I reel upon two slippery points . . . 

Fool, to stand here cursing 
When I might be running ! 

I find this almost convincing, more so than Ledwidge's 
Wife of Llevo ; yet it too savours of pedantry when 
compared with Sorley's Runners, 

AT NIGHTS 

At nights I sit here, 

Shading my eyes, shutting them if you glance up, 

Pretending to doze, 

And watching you. 

Thinking. 

I think of when I first saw the beauty of things — 

God knows I was poor enough and sad enough 

And humiliated enough — 

But not all the slights and the poorness and the worry 

Could hide away the green of the poplar leaves, 

The ripple and light of the little stream, 

The pattern of the ducks' feathers. 

The dawns I saw in the winter 

When I went shooting. 

The summer walks and the winter walks. 

The hot days with the cows coming down to the water. 

The flowers. 

Buttercups and meadow-sweet and hog's parsley. 

And the larks singing in the morning, and the thrushes 

Trilling at dusk when I went out into the fields 

Muttering poetry. 

I looked at the world as God did 

When first He made it. 

I saw that it was good. 

And now at nights. 

Now that everything has gone right somehow, 

And I have friends and books 

And no more bitterness, 

9^ 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

I sit here, shading my eyes, 
Peeping at you, watching you. 
Thinking. 

Good ! He is truly himself, but the mood has hardly 
momentum enough to create perfect form. But when at 
last we get passion we get song, 

AFTER TWO YEARS 

She is all so slight 
And tender and white 
As a May morning. 
She walks without hood 
At dusk. It is good 
To hear her sing. 

It is God's will 
That I shall love her still 
As He loves Mary. 
And night and day 
I will go forth to pray 
That she love me. 

There is a third stanza, but it rather detracts from 
these two, which are perfect in and by themselves. 

Since I wrote the above Richard Aldington has aug- 
mented his gift to the world by two tiny volumes.^ 
Reverie and The Love Poems of Myrrhine and Konallis. 
This last adds a new facet to his talent, for it covers the 
same ground as Les Amours de Bilitis, by Pierre Louis, 
compared to which these paragraphs seem shrunk, faint 
and uninspired. Unenglish pedantries such as "golden- 
hyacinth-curled hair" or "golden-wrought knees" or 
" vine-leaf-carved armlet " affect us like the despair of 
a translator after scratching his head for a long time. 
" Gold-flowered-crowned drink " indeed ! A rhetorical 

^ Privately issued by Charles C Bubb at his Private Press, Cleveland. 
1917. 

100 



RICHARD ALDINGTON 

use of such adjectives as white, swift, silver, golden, also 
detracts from that physical precision which is the glory 
of English. Yet the choice perfume of these poems 
haunts the mind. Christian civilisation has in nothing so 
failed to uphold its Founder's criterions as in censorious- 
ness. Moral disparagement of one sort or another 
permeates it. " Judge not that ye be not judged " looms 
from far in the dim and impracticable. Young men are, 
however, often open-minded and gentle towards sexual 
licentiousness ; it comes easily to them. Allowing for 
this, I still think that these spare paragraphs, which so 
poorly represent strophes, are redolent with that temper 
which not only refrains from censure, but does not judge, 
though in his case armed with what is called " the best 
right to. " These outworn forms of pagan life are regarded 
simply and graciously, if a trifle fondly. So to cherish 
distant things is rare ; and their faded colours revive 
under its kindness, as the dust-scored effacement of some 
broken shell of a freshly excavated vase might be vivified 
by a passing shower. 

H. D. takes us into another world, the tragic world of 
those who strive with the Sphinx. Is what we see con- 
trolled from the outside, or does the cosmos live ? Are we 
ourselves shaped by inspiration or by the pressure of 
conditions ? And if there are two forces, which will be 
master in the long run ? Passionate minds grapple with 
this problem ; their doubts, their faiths, their despairs 
are the result. Goethe's Prometheus is the first modern 
poem that shakes us with these emotions, and declares 
unending war on all external tyrants, however strong. 
His maturity could not finish what he had written ; the 
crisis was past, less tragic questions engrossed his 
attention ; but I venture to think that H. D.'s 
Pygmalion touches as great moments as did his 
insuppressibly creative Titan whose defiance cries out 
to Zeus : 

101 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

" Here sit I, and fashion men 
After mine own image, 
Of like temper with me, 
To suffer and weep, 
To enjoy and rejoice 
And heed thee as Httle 
As I." 

Leopardi and Arnold have since produced great poems 
in this key : the doomed fragility of the lovely broom 
bush on the slopes of Vesuvius is an apt and moving image 
for the despair inspired by the stupendous inequality 
between what is exquisite within and brutal without ; 
and in Arnold's Empedocles the despair of the man who 
has neglected life for thought is strangely capped by 
youth's serene joy in the harmonious world which it 
inherits. But H. D.'s sculptor, whose statues come to 
life, not, as in the old story, to content as a mistress or 
comfort as a wife, but silently to leave him in disdain, or 
as though they were of too different a nature to commune 
with him, discovers new abysses of tragic emotion for the 
indomitable creator's loneliness, ignorance and relative 
insignificance. 

The poem is too long and ill put together to quote as a 
whole. Too many images are used : that of fire, that of 
heat, and that of light, no doubt of intense distinctness 
to the writer, collide together and confuse the reader, who 
has not shared the long meditations which preceded the 
pangs and joys of creation. Fortunately by simple 
omission a satisfying simplicity can be obtained. 

PYGMALION 

I MADE god upon god 

Step from the cold rock, 

I made the gods less than men, 

For I was a man and they my work. 

102 



RICHARD ALDINGTON 

And now what is it that has come to pass ? 

" Each of the gods, perfect 
Cries out from a perfect throat : 
You are useless ; 
No marble can bind me 
No stone suggest. 
They have melted into the light 
And I am desolate. 
They have melted 
Each from his plinth, 
Each one departs. 

They have gone : 

What agony can express my grief ? 

Each from his marble base 

Has stepped into the light 

And my work is for naught." 

And after this, though before the passage occurs in 
the poem, the bereaved sculptor enters on an agony of 
interpretation. 

"A^Tiichaml 
The stone or the power 
Which lifts the rock from the earth ? " 

Or again — 



& 



" Which is the god, 
Which the stone 
The god takes for his use ? " 

The question debated would seem to be whether he was 
the power which created those gods or whether he himself 
had been made by the power which took them away. Is 
he himself the god ? "or is this arrogance ? " or are they, 
his handiwork, the power that shapes him unperceived ? 
But although most of it is pregnant wdth splendid sug- 
gestions, I can make neither head nor tail of it as it stands. 
Now what I have quoted is grander poetry- than anything 

103 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

I have read, either in French or in English, produced by 
the so-called rebel poets. This cry over the soul's effort 
that is lost in the world is grander than anything I have 
quoted from these Soldier Poets. Have we not seen 
man's wonderful creations go out from the workshop 
and join themselves to the hostile gods, the inclement 
conditions of his life. How many creeds, how many 
social orders that seemed stable and trustworthy have 
melted into air ! or, like soiled and rusting weapons, 
gangrened wounds dealt those they were fashioned to 
defend ! Vast wealth, created at immense cost in toil, 
in shame, in wrong and in suffering, is even now being 
used to damage and destroy men on a huger scale than 
earthquakes achieve. This image goes deeper than the 
forlorn agony of the artist; it is a universal tragedy 
that what we make makes us and then breaks us like 
a hostile power ; and can we know that we are shaped by 
divinity, when it is the outside pressure that hews roughly 
and desecrates our hopes ? Passion and power are 
present in others of H. D.'s poems, but nowhere else so 
successfully. 

Like Orestes and Electra, this young poet and poetess 
stand hand in hand, and a sculptor might well draw a 
splendid inspiration from their intrepidity ; but perhaps 
painting could better express how they face the colossal 
wickedness of the modern world and its tragedy, as the 
children of Agamemnon faced the cumulative murderous 
treacheries of " Pelops' line." Young, severe, and de- 
termined to live and die in defence of that ideal beauty 
that for us as for them is called Greece, let us picture 
them under the dark pall of the war, but behind them a 
glimpse of those blue seas and temple-crowned cliffs. Or 
shall he show her his hands as in a little prose poem 
written from the trenches ? 

" I am grieved for our hands, our hands that have 
caressed roses and women's flesh, old lovely books and 
104 



RICHARD ALDINGTON 

marbles of Carrara. I am grieved for our hands that 
were so reverent in beauty's service, so glad of beauty's 
tresses, hair and silken robe and gentle fingers, so glad 
of beauty of bronze and wood and stone and rustling 
parchment. So glad, so reverent, so white. . . , 

" I am grieved for our hands. ..." 

She holds the torch near to look and its light floods 
her face, while he smiles, for she reveals her own un- 
conscious beauty in the act of pitying his hands, blunted, 
stiffened and begrimed by his foul task. 



105 



ALAN SEEGEE 

Love, arms and song, and a noble frankness that asserts, 
" My kingdom is of this world," characterise America's 
leading soldier poet, who fell in action on 4.th July 1916. 

Alan Seeger was born in New York in 1888, of old New 
England parentage. For ten years Staten Island, in the 
mouth of the harbour, was his home. Later the family 
settled at Mexico City, in the tropics, but 7400 feet above 
the sea. He entered Harvard in 1906 and came to Paris 
in 1912, and, when the war broke out, was among the 
first half-hundred of his countrj^men to enlist in the 
Foreign Legion of France, and soon writes from the Front : 

" I have always thirsted for this kind of thing, to be 
present where the pulsations are livehest. Every minute 
here is worth weeks of ordinary experience. . . . This will 
spoil one for any other kind of life. . . . Death is nothing 
terrible after all. It may mean something even more 
wonderful than life. It cannot possibly mean anything 
worse to a good soldier. . . . Success in life means doing 
that thing than which nothing else conceivable seems 
more noble or satisfying or remunerative, and this enviable 
state I can truly say I enjoy, for had I the choice, I would 
be nowhere else in the world than where I am." ^ 

From him as from Grenfell this sentiment comes in- 
evitably ; and he was no soldier by profession, but, in so 
far as he had chosen any, a poet. At first sight they seem 
twin natures in ardour, in frankness, in courage, in de- 
votion ; only gradually can the spirit become reconciled 
to admitting an immense difference. 

The temptation is to apply here the common Enghsh 
prejudice as to where the American fails. But this would 
be uncritical, for exceptional natures least conform to 

1 Poems by Alan Seeger. Introduction by W. Archer. Constable & 
Co. Quotations by permission of C. L. Seeger, Esq., and Messrs 
Constable. 

lt)7 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

national foibles. Seeger contrasts with Grenfell as Byron 
with Shelley rather than as Yankee with Britisher. Only 
by crushing the grapes of his thought against a fine palate 
shall we be able to distinguish their flavour from very 
highly prized fruit. After a few pages his clarity, like 
that of Swinburne, confuses the reader, for if his virtue 
is not to hesitate, his fault is to let the thread sag in the 
hurry and volume of eloquence ; and this great fluency 
and facility accompany a lack of delicate choicefulness. 
In vain you search for such precision in joy as inspired 
Ledwidge's happiest images, or for details that amount to 
revelations as did Thomas's best. All kinds of beauty 
are welcomed, but too indiscriminately. '' You will say 
they are Persian attire ; but let them be changed," is the 
instinctive comment of many resolute minds on encounter- 
ing to-day that flaunting habit which ranges women and 
wine in a single category. Rakish nakedness offends 
their studied composure, and others may be surprised to 
find neither fatigue, hopelessness nor cynicism in the 
voice that proclaims : 

" And in old times I should have prayed to her 
Whose haunt the groves of windy Cyprus were, 
To prosper me and crown with good success 
My will to make of you the rose-twined bowl 
From whose inebriating brim my soul 
Shall drink its last of earthly happiness." 

This is from one of a series of sonnets written during 
leave from the Front. Another with the same object 
pursues : 

" Enchanting girl, my faith is not a thing 
By futile prayers and vapid psalm- singing 
To vent in crowded nave and public pew. 
My creed is simple : that the world is fair. 
And beauty the best thing to worship there, 
And I confess it by adoring you." 

108 



ALAN SEEGER 

And this world is defied as gallantly as the other : 

" Let not propriety nor prejudice 
Nor the precepts of jealous age deny 
What Sense so incontestably affirms ; 
Cling to the blessed moment and drink deep 
Of the sweet cup it tends, as there alone 
Were that which makes life worth the pain to live." 

Nay, not even death, and what dreams may follow, can 
give him pause : 

" Exiled afar from youth and happy love, 
If Death should ravish my fond spirit hence 
I have no doubt but, like a homing dove. 
It would return to its dear residence, 
And through a thousand stars find out the road 
Back into earthly flesh that was its loved abode." 

Neither heaven nor the possibilities of time and space 
can offer anything better, a return to known delights is all 
that can be desired. The old have not infrequently gazed 
back with something of this feeling, and the illusions of 
perspective may excuse them ; but that a young man 
should be so certain that he has seen the bottom of the 
cup of happiness, and that it could never be refilled with 
rarer liquors, suggests a near-sighted imagination. So 
masterful a conviction that no finer means than those 
you were born with could achieve more exquisite ends 
i sets the mind pondering ; and a plausible philosophy 
I might maintain that youth's vivid apprehension of the 
I worth of actual objects, persons and events was the 
source of all significance, the criterion by which every- 
thing else is really judged. Wordsworth could almost 
have subscribed to this belief; he expressed a very 
I similar intuition though with a less truculent directness. 
; In fact I think this comparison brings home to us a failure 
I in the mood of Alan Seeger's ecstasy. We have all met 
I these gifted young men who seem to tread above the 

109 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

heads of the crowd ; perhaps most of us can recall some- I 
thing of how it feels inside them. The most coy have '* 
known the itch to swagger, the most staid have longed to 
shout from the house-top, and modesty itself has desired 
to stand forth naked and unashamed ; so that a deep 
and widespread welcome greets these manifestations even 
among those who dare not avow their approval and 
whose lives would contradict them if they did. Words- 
worth himself confessed that he had not written love 
poems because if he had done so they would have been 
too warm for publication. 

" All true speech and large avowal 
Which the jealous soul concedes, 
All man's heart that brooks bestowal, I 

All frank faith which passion breeds." ' 

are of the very essence of poetry, and will be cherished 
by every loyal nature. Propriety is forbidden to intervene 
when soul communes with soul, her sphere is downstairs 
in the world of half relations and approximate intercourse. 
But in proportion as you claim to go naked, you must 
keep near to the heart of things, and make the very truth 
your inseparable companion. Anything off-hand, any- 
thing insensitive or not quite alive offends these com- 
municants, hke the touch of a corpse. Humbleness like 
that of a child is born from this intensity. Any thought 
of the myriad eyes that overpeer a stage should be im- 
possible ; the world is forgotten when the spirit dances 
naked in the light to which joy entrusts it— tender joy for 
whom the damage of the pale green, ruby-eyed, lace- winged 
fly is a calamity to avert with tears and supplications. 
"Everything that Hves is holy." If Seeger hves in his 
poetry, everything else passes like a ghost, like a reference 
only : his one imperious desire is to cast a personal spell 
upon us all. Will not something unmistakably itself 
arrest this fervid eloquence that deals in clouds and stars 
110 

4 



ALAN SEEGER 

and all the commonplaces of poetry with such profusion ! 
Were but the young women addressed, ever qualified by 
an adjective proper to some one girl ! No, Alan Seeger 
is alone felt, with this delightful freshness, a presence, 
an inspiration ! 

" Sidney, in whom the hey-day of romance 
Came to its precious and most perfect flower, 
Whether you turneyed with victorious lance 
Or brought sweet roundelays to Stella's bower, 
I give myself some credit for the way 
I have kept clean of what enslaves and lowers. 
Shunned the ideals of our present day 

' And studied those that were esteemed in yours — 
For, turning from the mob that buys Success 
By sacrificing all Life's better part, 
Down the free roads of human happiness 
I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart, 
And lived in strict devotion all along 
To my three idols — ^Love and Arms and Song." 

" I could accuse myself of such things that it were 
)etter my mother had not borne me. . . . We are arrant 
cnaves all " — in speaking thus was Hamlet so certainly 
nad as this sonnet implies ? The worry and stress that 
' honesty of puipose and intellectual honesty " cost 
jrenfell are remembered with regret. 

"I cannot rest 
/Vhile aught of beauty in any path untrod 
swells into bloom and spreads sweet charms abroad 
Jn worshipped of my love. I cannot see 
n Life's profusion and passionate brevity 
low hearts enamoured of life can strain too much 
n one long tension to hear, to see, to touch." 

le is too eager, too arrogant, to await the visit of those 
wonders which steal unsought into consciousness. A 
' wise passiveness " was no mood of his. His ambition 
mulates Byron's, who hated to think himself a mere poet 

111 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

and itched for acted glory : thus Seeger, gazing beyond 
the war's end, cries : 

" And the great cities of the world shall yet 
Be golden frames for me in which to set 
New masterpieces of more rare romance." 

He fears no repetition of that defeat which yet en- 
chanted the world with its misanthropy and cynicism, 
but strains after a vision fellow to that followed by the 
pilgrim lord from Harrow to Missolonghi. If in spite of 
failure this temperament achieved so much, what might 
it not succeed in ? So active, so independent, so daring 
a nature has as many opportunities of acquiring wisdom 
as it has of refusing to bow its head under ruin. Though 
a soul consciously poses while loving, though when heroic 
it must be setting an example to half the world, this 
effrontery, largely inexperience, may betoken the very 
vigour that can grapple with the monster fact on the 
soul's behalf. Already he can philosophise his pre- 
occupation with sexual passion. 

" Oh Love whereof my boyhood was the dream 
My youth the beautiful novitiate, 

Life was so slight a thing and thou so great, i 

How could I make thee less than all supreme ! f 

In thy sweet transports not alone I thought 
Mingled the twain that panted breast to breast, 
The sun and stars throbbed with them ; they were caught 
Into the pulse of Nature. ... 

Doubt not that of a perfect sacrifice 

That soul partakes whose inspiration fills 

The spring-time and the depth of smnmer skies 

The rainbow and the clouds behind the hills, 

That excellence in earth and air and sea 

That makes things as they are the real divinity." 

Yes, his brain keeps pace with his eloquence ; but his 
soul ? Hasty and crude and licensed to scorn the 

112 



ALAN SEEGER 

maimed and mauled by youth's ignorance of irreparable 
damage, he does not hesitate, on returning to the trenches, 
to offer his gallant comrades these ungenerous lines which 
were possibly not really aimed at the invalids he had met 
at Biarritz, but at those whom he could never forget, his 
equals in youth and strength, who then still lingered in 
the States. 

" Apart sweet women (for whom heaven be blessed), 
Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue 
Look the left-overs of mankind that rest, 
Now that the cream has been skimmed off in you. 
. . . we turn disdainful backs 
On that poor world we scorn, yet die to shield, — 
That world of cowards, hypocrites and fools." 

He has given himself for the freedom of all future souls, 
what right have we to question whether he gave his own 
conscience due reverence ? Could we have divined King 
Lear from reading Venus and Adonis ? That ready 
aptness of phrase which in my citations has delighted the 
reader is constantly achieved in his later poems, if only 
by four or six lines at a time. And though the inspired 
peaks rise tier behind tier above this plateau, you find 
few flowers more brilliant without climbing higher. Yet 
that failure in delicate choicefulness insistently prophesies 
woe, and was not so striking in Swinburne or more so in 
Byron at his years. The Deserted Garden, his longest 
poem, yielded as abundant opportunities as Venus and 
Adonis could, but no line like 

" A lily prisoned in a gale of snow " 

takes the advantage. In spite of formlessness, how 
delightful the Keats of Endymion would have made this 
old Mexican garden, where the young Seeger dreams the 
meetings of bygone lovers. He, however, only maintains 
his obvious efficiency, and we are never " surprised with 
joy " : in the end we are only surprised that he can keep 

H 113 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

it up, as we often have been when Swinburne was not 
first rate. Did the magnoHa bud of this large soul lodge 
a canker ? Yet, though we can only surmise what his 
full-blown splendour might have been, he was ever so 
slightly opening ; his latest sonnets are not only the most 
manifold, but deeper and almost fragrant. 

" Seeing you have not come with me, nor spent 
This day's suggestive beauty as we ought, 
I have gone forth alone and been content 
To make you mistress only of my thought." 

" I am the field of undulating grass 
And you the gentle perfume of the Spring, 
And all my lyric being, when you pass. 
Is bowed and filled with sudden murmuring." 

" For I have ever gone imtied and free. 
The stars and my high thoughts for company ; 
Wet with the salt spray and the mountain showers, 
I have had the sense of space and amplitude. 
And love in many places, silver- shoed. 
Has come and scattered all my path with flowers." 

Four lines from two sonnets, six from a third, and you 
build up a new one richer and stronger than any of the 
three. For all these flashes are like the flap of a flame in 
a swirl of smoke ; some pleasure in his own attitude, some 
self-assertion causes the momentary brilliance among the 
ever-flowing grey ghosts of scheduled ornament which 
make the bulk of a rhetorical style. But he has gentle, 
more promising moods. 

" There have been times when I could storm and plead. 

But you shall never hear me supplicate. 

These long months that have magnified my need 

Have made my asking less importunate ; 

For now small favours seem to me so great 

That not the courteous lovers of old time 

Were more content to rule themselves and wait. 

Easing desire with discourse and sweet rhyme." 
114 



Ji 



ALAN SEEGER 

He even stands staring at the different tempers created 
in him by self-seeking and self-devotion. 

" Oh love of woman, you are known to be 
A passion sent to plague the hearts of men ; 
For every one you bring felicity 
Bringing rebuffs and wretchedness to ten. 
I have been oft where human life sold cheap 
And seen men's brains spilled out about their ears 
And yet that never cost me any sleep ; 
I lived untroubled and I shed no tears. 
Fools prate how war is an atrocious thing ; 
I always knew that nothing it implied 
Equalled the agony and suffering 
Of him who loves and loves unsatisfied. 
War is a refuge to a heart like this ; 
Love only tells it what true torture is." 

Playing his part with the best at the Front, he was by 
no means merely acting a Message to America in order to 
bring her into line. He really loved France and under- 
stood something of what she stands for in civilisation. 
He is compact with generosity which is none the less real 
for being self- appreciated. 

" O friends, in your fortunate present ease 
(Yet faced by the self-same facts as these). 
If you would see how a race can soar 
That has no love, but no fear of war. 
How each can turn from his private role 
That all may act as a perfect whole. 
How men can live up to the place they claim, 
And a nation jealous of its good name, 
Be true to its proud inheritance. 
Oh, look over here and learn from France ! " 

And he too seeks to think well of Death, and, having 
most fancied himself as a lover, thinks himself "half in 
love with " glorious Death. 

115 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

" I know not if in risking my best days 
I shall leave utterly behind me here 
This dream that lightened me through lonesome ways 
And that no disappointment made less dear ; 
Sometimes I think that, where the hill- tops rear 
Their white entrenchments back of tangled wire, 
Behind the mist Death only can make clear, 
There, like Brunhilde ringed with flaming fire, 
Lies what shall ease my heart's immense desire : 
There, where beyond the horror and the pain 
Only the brave shall pass, only the strong attain." 

But from a greater depth comes the simple fatalism 
which informs his finest sayings about life and love. 

MAKTOOB 

A SHELL surprised our post one day 
And killed a comrade at my side ; 
My heart was sick to see the way 
He suffered as he died. 

I dug about the place he fell, 
And found, no bigger than my thumb, 
A fragment of the splintered shell 
In warm aluminum. 

I melted it and made a mould 

And poured it in the opening 

And worked it, when the cast was cold. 

Into a shapely ring. 

And when my ring was smooth and bright, 
Holding it on a rounded stick. 
For seal, I bade a Turco write 
Maktoob in Arabic. 

Maktoob ! " 'Tis written ! " So they think, 
These children of the desert, who 
From its immense expanses drink 
Some of its grandeur too. 

116 



ALAN SEEGER 

And after some less convincing circumstance of entry to 
a Valhalla he ends by telling how these graven characters 
calm him. 

" When not to hear some try to talk, 
And some to clean their guns and sing, 
And some dig deeper in the chalk — 
I look upon my ring : 

And nerves relax that were most tense, 
And Death comes whistling down unheard, 
As I consider all the sense 
Held in that mystic word. 

And it brings, quieting like balm 
My heart whose flutterings have ceased, 
The resignation and the calm 
And wisdom of the East." 

Ample quotation seemed needed to illumine this 
soldier's fine attitude. His style takes no end of room ; 
more time was demanded than love and arms could spare 
for it to grow as rare as it was large. Still, granted a 
more prolonged lease of pleasure-hunting, we might have 
had to deplore luxuriance tangled to perversity, no longer 
merely grown too fast for strength. To what extent war 
was a tonic to his extravagance remains uncertain, even 
after repeated readings of his later poems. Every young 
man has perforce many possible careers — ^unwritten books 
whose titles and contents we may dream of, though hands 
will never part their leaves, nor eyes peruse. Still there 
is some faint compensation for this in esteeming them at 
their highest possible value, though it but increase our 
sense of loss ; for worth conceived is prophetic of that 
yet to be revealed by the ever-teeming future. 

Look at him crowning himself, prematurely, as Shake- 
speare's hero prince did, yet, like him, conscious of 
deserving the " rigol " by innate capacity and determina- 

117 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

tion. Both hands raise the empty hoop, then pause, for 
through it stars watch him, brilliant and remote. In 
black bronze he stands for ever returning their gaze — no 
work of Phidias, rather by some Scopas or Praxiteles, 
whose more indulgent rhythm induces a musical ripple 
throughout the war-hardened muscles of his twenty-eight 
years. 



118 



THE BEST POETRY 

I SHALL attempt to show you why the best poetry 
usually passes unobserved, and how you may train, 
yourselves to recognise it. 

Matthew Arnold, our greatest literary critic in the last 
century, thought that if we were to draw full benefit from 
poetry " we must accustom ourselves to a high standard 
and to a strict judgment," and thus learn to recognise 
'* the best in poetry." 

No easy task, you think. 

Yet the means whereby it may be accomplished are 
simple. 

First : A habit of making the mind up as to which 
poem among those we read satisfies us best ; not to rest 
there, nor until we know whether the whole poem causes 
our admiration or whether parts of it are only accepted 
as introduction or sequel to this or that passage ; till, if 
possible, we discriminate the most perfect line, phrase or 
rhythm. 

Secondly : A determination to become intimate only 
with verse that stands the test of our most active moods, 
instead of letting the luckless day, with its relaxed temper, 
console itself with something that we have perceived to 
be second-rate. For in proportion as we are loyal to our 
taste, it will become more difficult to please until at last a 
really sound judgment is acquired. 

Perhaps you will think I speak too confidently, and 
that good taste in poetry is not within the reach of every 
honest endeavour. 

For a while please imagine that you may be mistaken, 
and admit that the method of developing taste is possibly 
both simple and native to mankind. 

Difficulty really arises through the mind's preoccupa- 
tions, which prevent a sufficiency of consideration being 
applied to aesthetic experience. So manifold and strong 

119 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

are these distractions that perhaps not more than half-a- 
dozen men in a generation continue to form their taste 
through many years together. 

The probabiHty of this will appear if we roughly sketch 
the accidents which deter us from persevering, even 
though we leave out of sight all those which deprive taste 
of opportunity, and indicate merely such as induce bad 
habits of mind. 

Many readers, supposing them to have set out un- 
prejudiced, may soon be committed to praise or blame, 
and then prove reluctant to revise and reject those so 
confident judgments. This unwillingness to renounce 
infallibility already seduces their minds to continue a 
higher strain of praise or a more rigorous blame than 
now appears due ; and such disloyalty spreading will 
even blight the roots of admiration. 

More modest souls are, on the contrary, all ears for 
others' opinions ; yet the very openness of their minds 
may let in such a crowd of contradictory voices that in 
the din and confusion their own poor reason, unable to 
hold its own, by degrees acquiesces in silence. 

Some, again, read verse so quickly or in such quantities 
that energy fails them for searching, sifting and listening 
to their genuine impressions with ardour and thorough- 
ness : while others will desist from effort through mere 
indolence, and so making fewer and fewer discoveries of 
excellence, will gradually take less interest in poetry, till 
they no longer find it worth while to read any. 

Then there are those who conclude that great poets 
produce nothing but great poetry, and drown their taste 
in forced admiration for a sea of failure, since success 
crowns the efforts of poetical geniuses far less frequently 
than those of skilled artisans. 

Taste, in minds more orderly than appreciative, is 
often suffocated by scholarship. Knowledge concerning 
man, period or text absorbs them, till beauty, whose 

120 



THE BEST POETRY 

supposed presence was their pretext for study, is habitu- 
ally overlooked by their famiHarity. 

Again, ardent partisans will find the poetry whose 
beauty most deHghts them tainted with convictions to 
which they are opposed — heterodox rehgious dogmas, or 
ultra Tory or ultra Radical theories with which they have 
no patience : or it may even happen that some true poet 
shocks their respectability with what they can honestly 
call gross immorality. 

In all these ways, and many more, men habitually 
stimt and adulterate their taste instead of allowing it to 
refresh, refine and reform their minds, even when they 
have started unprejudiced, and alert for discovery. 

Now a still greater mass of individuals are biassed 
against poetry from the start. Its mere unfamiliarity 
appals them. Like old-fashioned servants, they keep 
their lives consistently downstairs in regard to it. 
Whether vice or virtue, it is not for the likes of 
them. 

Their bolder brothers are ashamed to associate so 
fantastic a mode of speech with business-like cogitations. 
Rhyme is all very well in a music hall song ; but what an 
inconceivable nuisance to a man who wishes to be undis- 
tracted ! And even when not so alienated by ignorance, 
or the inhuman circumstances of their lives, they may 
alone be impressionable through some enthusiasm, and 
thus become exclusive readers of imperialistic or socialistic 
verse because they are aglow with sympathy for the 
poet's ideas, and remain immovable by similar or superior 
beauties not so associated. 

In this way many folk enjoy hymns to whom all other 
poetry is distasteful, or are ravished by limericks who 
could not be tempted to open a Golden Treasury. 

Again the kindling eloquence of some critic, the voice 
and manner of some reader, cause their taste to be passion- 
ately espoused : when the same ardent hero-worship 

121 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

which transplants it may prove the enemy of its further 
growth. For discipleship will often take a perverse pride 
in refusing to admire and love, except where it has the 
warrant of its master's actual example. 

All these are kinds of initial bigotries which may easily 
be so ingrained in a person of fourteen that hardly any 
upheaval can be conceived which should lay bare the 
foundations of their humanity to this most congenial of 
influences, the power of the best poetry. 

A third class are those who are meanly corrupt ; en- 
dowed with a little taste, they have employed it on 
personal or social ends, instead of desiring to be employed 
by it in the discovery of excellence. They have sought 
sentimental consolations or a pick-me-up for enthusiasm, 
and used and abused this nectar as others use and abuse 
alcohol. 

Or by its means they have tried to shine in society, to 
pass for cultured people cheaply. Or they have learned 
to understand and theorise about it in order to teach in a 
school or give an extension lecture ; or, through the weak- 
ness of all their other tastes, have drifted into literary 
criticism or a professorship at a university by way of 
excusing their existence. 

In all these ways taste may be harnessed to a market 
cart, and trot backwards and forwards on the highway, 
respected among other respectable trades, but stunted, 
cowed and gelded. 

Now, suppose that all these dangers have been avoided 
— and there are few walks of life not notably infested by 
one or another of them — right across the road of progress 
in good taste there then lies waiting a more terrible ogre, 
who enslaves great geniuses and starves minds potentially 
as rich as the Indies. He is that species of vanity which 
admires what is impertinent or accidental because it is a 
man's own. All satisfaction with mere cleverness, mere 
daintiness, mere subtlety, oddity, bravado, bluffness, etc., 

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THE BEST POETRY 

with which fine designs have been teased or disfigured is 
wound of his deahng. No literature has he scarred more 
deeply than our English. Shakespeare himself could not 
defend the grandest poems ever conceived against his 
barbarity. 

" * Be true to your taste,' this mocking giant cries, 
' your own taste, not any one else's. Be not overborne by 
tradition or corrupted by fashion. Dare on your own 
account and let the ideal take care of itself. What ! 
Correct nature, correct yourself ! Amazing nonsense ! 
You are what you are ; Nature is what it is. That is all 
we want to know ; all we can admire." 

Deluded by this advocate of a specious loyalty to taste, 
men tie themselves to first thoughts and raw emotions as 
though these were more essentially their own than thoughts 
cleared and polished by reflection, or. emotion chastened 
by considerate expression. They will relinquish study in 
dread of tainting their originality, checking their verve, or 
confusing their impressions. " I want to put dovm just 
what I think, what I feel, nothing more, nothing less," 
they plead. Alas ! had you taken up with that theory in 
infancy you would be a baby still. 

A thriving taste is like a seedling, intensely itself, but 
determined to be a tree. Its possessor must be loyal to 
the laws of its growth and provide it with food, light, air. 
It does not desire instant petrifaction to preserve it from 
change and inconsistency, but is eager to embrace and 
attack the unknown in order to obtain new impressions, to 
arrange and recompose with its own. And as a creator 
who owns such a taste is constantly recasting, reconsider- 
ing and correcting his work, and eschews both haste and 
lethargy, so an appreciator, whose taste lives, strives after 
larger comprehension by watching those whom he sur- 
mises may possibly possess such ; and by sifting and 

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SOME SOLDIER POETS 

searching his present judgments he will be constantly re- 
constructing hierarchies of merit, giving marks, 100 for 
Shakespeare's best sonnet, a duck's egg for his worst. 

Mr Lascelles Abercrombie lately published The Sale of 
St Thomas, a fine poem. He must take up at least half-a- 
dozen poets and come very near the top of the class. Yet, 
if in The Emblems of Love, which has appeared since, he 
seems to us to have done but little to secure that pre- 
eminence, this also should be promptly admitted. 

In a definite number of stanzas Mr Herbert Trench's 
fine gift of a musical style becomes one with felicity of 
conception. It is worth while to know it, and to be 
jealous over a single unit more or less. This ceaseless 
movement and reorganisation of a man's judgment is a 
condition of the growth of taste, and enables him to look 
back on bygone admirations with the conviction that 
those of to-day are stronger, more definite and yield him 
purer delight. 

But improviser and impressionist accept just what 
happens to be there, and, while they try to record it un- 
altered by reason or tendency, it dwindles for lack of the 
nourishment that a purpose and reconsideration would 
have given it. Impressionism should not be regarded as 
the practice of a school of painters ; this bad habit is as 
old as Jubal, the father of all such as handle the harp and 
organ. Even the modern avowed and vainglorious im- 
pressionism impoverished the art not only of Whistler, 
but that of Meredith ; nay, it had infected even such a 
genius as Browning, and all but justifies what Mr San- 
tayana, perhaps the finest literary critic alive, says of 
him : 

" Now it is in the conception of things fundamental and 
ultimate that Browning is weak, he is strong in the con- 
ception of things immediate. The pulse of emotion, the 
bobbing up of thought, the streaming of reverie — these he 



THE BEST POETRY 

can note down with picturesque force or imagine with 
admirable fecundity. Yet the limits of such excellence 
are narrow. For no man can safely go far without the 
guidance of reason. His long poems have no structure. 
. . . Even his short poems have no completeness, no lim- 
pidity. . . . What is admirable in them is the pregnancy 
of phrase, vividness of passion and sentiment, heaped-up 
scraps of observation, occasional flashes of light, occasional 
beauties of versification, all like — 

' The quick sharp scratch 
And blue spurt of a lighted match.' 

There is never anything largely composed in the spirit of 
pure beauty, nothing devotedly finished, nothing simple 
and truly just." ^ 

Rossetti called a sonnet " a moment's monument." 
Fortunately he did not mean all he might have meant 
by it, and his own sonnets were the result of long hours 
of meditation, and recast again and again. His phrase, 
however, epitomises this theory ; a moment, not a choice 
moment, but any single moment, is considered as worthy 
of an eternal monument. With this end in view the writer 
is more fortunate than the artist. He may record minute 
after minute just what words come into his head, till at 
last none come and his work is finished. And apprecia- 
tion for such work is acquired in the same manner, by 
stupefying reason and yielding oneself, like the smoker of 
opium, to a stream of suggestions. 

The out-and-out impressionist would be like a man who 
should strip his clothes off in order to prove that his 
honesty needed no disguise, and, when he was naked, must 
be clapped into an asylum because he had lost his wits. 
Instead of accumulating resources, the improviser or im- 
pressionist whittles them away ; though he be rich at the 

^Poetry and Religion ^ "The Poetry of Barbarism," p. 208. 

125 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

outstart, he will always be poorer in the end. This pro- 
cess has a widespread fascination even in practical life, as 
the bankruptcy courts attest. Running downhill begets 
its proper exhilaration, one moves faster and faster ; the 
invigoration derived from ascending must maintain itself 
in spite of decreasing speed. 

Now not only do the victims of these many maladies of 
taste which I have enumerated miss sound health, but, by 
implacable necessity, they become passively or actively, 
here or there, enemies and maltreaters of poetry, who 
resist and persecute her best. 

Why should we then wonder at the ups and downs of 
literary history, the bHndness of contemporaries, the long- 
continued bigotry of worthless fashions, or at the lives 
and misfortunes of poets ? 

Poetry, as distinguished from prose, is formally 
rhythmic ; and the reason why it is so, is that a majority 
of the finest mentalities have considered formal rhythms 
capable of greater beauty. Apart from their beauty, they 
are simply inconvenient. 

Browning compares the ravishing depth and warmth of 
colour, which Keats discovered the secret of, to Tyrian 
purple, and says that he flooded the literary market with — 

" Enough to furnish Solomon 
Such hangings for his cedar- house, 
That, when gold- robed he took the throne 
In that abyss of blue, the Spouse 
Might swear his presence shone 

Most like the centre- spike of gold 
Which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb. 
What time, with ardours manifold, 
The bee goes singing to her groom, 
Drunken and over-bold." 

— stanzas whose beauty is worthy to rank with Keats 's 
own work, and which add to his luxurious richness of 

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THE BEST POETRY 

diction a directness and energy of movement such as he 
has left no example of. 
But Browning continues : 

" And there's the extract, flasked and fine 
And priced and saleable at last ! 
And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes and Nokes combine 
To paint the future from the past, 
Put blue into their line. 

Hobbs hints blue, — straight he turtle eats : 
Nobbs prints blue, — claret crowns his cup : 
Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats, — 
Both gorge. Who fished the murex up ? 
What porridge had John Keats ? " ^ 

— stanzas in which the artificial form of verse seems 
merely to incommode that vigour and directness, so 
eminently characteristic of Browning, both when he 
writes poetry and when he distorts prose into its sem- 
blance and caricature. 
Take another instance of this abuse, from Wordsworth : 

" Yes, it was the mountain echo. 
Solitary, clear, profound. 
Answering to the shouting cuckoo 
Giving to her sound for sound. 

Unsolicited reply 

To a babbling wanderer sent ; 

Like her ordinary cry 

Like — ^but oh, how different ! " 

These two stanzas enchant the ear, and kindle the mind 
to joyous receptiveness. But alas ! the poet continues 
much as the genius of the Salvation Army adapts the 
tune of a successful music hall song to other words. 

*' Hears not also mortal life ? 
Hear not we unthinking creatures 
Slaves of folly, love, and strife — 
Voices of two different natures ? 

1 Browning's Worhs^ " Popularity," vol. vi., p. 192. 

127 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

Have not we too ? — yes, we have 
Answers, and we know not whence ; 
Echoes from beyond the grave 
Recognised inteUigence ! 

Often as thy inward ear 
Catches such rebounds, beware ! — 
Listen, ponder, hold them dear ; 
For of God,— of God they are." i 

And one has almost forgotten that he was inspired 
when he set out. The Muse was responsible for those 
first delightful stanzas ; Mr Wordsworth, philosophical 
member of the Church of England, for the three last, 
commendable in many ways but not as poetry, since all 
they say might have been expressed as well or even better 
in prose. 

Emerson says : 

"The thought, the happy image, which expressed it, 
and which was a true experience to the poet, recurs to the 
mind, and sends me back in search of the book. And I 
wish that the poet should foresee this habit of readers, 
and omit all but important passages. Shakespeare is 
made up of important passages, like Damascus steel 
made up of old nails." ^ 

It would have been much better if Wordsworth had 
published his two stanzas and Browning his two, and 
omitted the rest of their poems. Why did they not ? 

Emerson shall tell us : 

" Great design belongs to a poem and is better than any 
skill of execution, — but how rare ! I find it in the poems 
of Wordsworth, Laodamia and the Ode to Dion, and the 
plan of The Recluse. We want design, and do not forgive 

1 Poems of the Imagination, xxix. 

^Letters and Social Aims, "Poetry and Imagination," p. 162. 

128 



THE BEST POETRY 

the bards if they have only the art of enamelling. We 
want an architect and they bring us an upholsterer." ^ 

It is this demand that makes the poet shy of proffering 
his fragment of pure gold, and eggs him on to work it into 
a statue by adding clay, iron, or anything else which he 
has handy. 

That ode on Dion, which Emerson mentions, set out to 
be the finest ode in our language, and though less com- 
plete, less successful than several of Keats 's, it still retains 
some superiority over them. As a magical treatment of 
the tragedy of heroism, it stands beside Milton's Samson 
Agonistes, and the scene of the quarrel between Brutus 
and Cassius in Julius Ccesar, That scene Nietzsche 
considered the grandest in all Shakespeare, on account 
of the importance and dignity of its theme ; and the 
ode on Dion may claim a similar advantage among 
other odes. 

Wordsworth's subject was not Dion's tragedy, as told 
by Plutarch, but his own sense of its import : yet he 
seems to have felt uneasy at not telling the story, and 
breaks off to paint a preliminary scene ; then the might 
of his true subject seizes him again, and he rushes on to 
his goal, the events that carry the moral. Now this 
moral is the most important inference to be drawn from 
experience, and raises the question about which men will 
contend longest. 

The facts necessary for the comprehension of the poem, 
but not easily to be deduced from reading it, are that Dion 
was a finely gifted man and Plato's disciple ; had been 
unjustly exiled, and on his return, coming to the head of 
affairs, intended to use power ideally, yet permitted the 
opponent of his government to be illegally put to death; 
was reproached for this in a vision, and soon after fell a 
victim to an assassin's knife. 

^ Letters and Social Aims, "Poetry and Imagination," p. 153. 
1 129 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

In reading, I will omit the division of clay ; you can all 
decide whether I am justified in so doing when you read 
the poem for yourselves at your leisure. 

The beauty of Dion's character and its relation to that 
of Plato are first compared to a white swan sailing in the 
light of the moon. 

" Fair is the swan, whose majesty, prevailing 
O'er breezeless water, on Locarno's lake, 
.Bears him on while proudly sailing 
He leaves behind a moon-illumined wake : 
Behold ! the mantling spirit of reserve 
Fashions his neck into a goodly curve ; 
An arch thrown back between luxuriant wings 
Of whitest garniture, like fir-tree boughs 
To which, on some unruffled morning, clings 
A flaky weight of winter's purest snows ! 
— ^Behold ! — as with a gushing impulse heaves 
That downy prow, and softly cleaves 
The mirror of the crystal flood. 
Vanish inverted hill, and shadowy wood^ 
And pendent rocks, where'er, in gliding state, 
Winds the mute Creature without visible mate 
Or rival, save the Queen of night 
Showering down a silver light. 
From heaven, upon her chosen favourite ! 

So pure, so bright, so fitted to embrace. 

Where'er he turned, a natural grace 

Of haughtiness without pretence, 

And to unfold a still magnificence. 

Was princely Dion, in the power 

And beauty of his happier hour. 

Nor less the homage that was seen to wait 

On Dion's virtues, when the lunar beam 

Of Plato's genius, from its lofty sphere 

Fell round him in the grove of Academe, 

Softening their inbred dignity austere — 

That he, not too elate 

With self-sufficing solitude. 

But with majestic lowliness endued, 

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THE BEST POETRY 

Might in the universal bosom reign, 
And from affectionate observance gain 
Help, under every change of adverse fate. 



Mourn, hills and groves of Attica ! and mourn 

lUisus, bending o'er thy classic urn ! 

Mourn, and lament for him whose spirit dreads 

Your once sweet memory, studious walks and shades ! 

For him who to divinity aspired, 

Not on the breath of popular applause. 

But through dependence on the sacred laws 

Framed in the schools where Wisdom dwelt retired, 

Intent to trace the ideal path of right 

(More fair than heaven's broad causeway paved with 

stars) 
Which Dion learned to measure with delight ; — 
But he hath overleaped the eternal bars ; 
And, following guides whose craft holds no consent 
With aught that breathes the ethereal element, 
Hath stained the robes of civil power with blood. 
Unjustly shed, though for the public good. 
Whence doubts that came too late, and wishes vain. 
Hollow excuses, and triumphant pain ; 
And oft his cogitations sink as low 
As, through the abysses of a joyless heart, 
The heaviest plummet of despair can go — 
But whence that sudden check ? that fearful start ! 
He hears an uncouth sound — 
Anon his lifted eyes 

Saw, at a long-drawn gallery's dusky bound, 
A shape of more than mortal size 
And hideous aspect, stalking round and round ! 
A woman's garb the Phantom wore. 
And fiercely swept the marble floor, — 
Like Auster whirling to and fro 
His force on Caspian foam to try ; 
Or Boreas when he scours the snow 
That skins the plains of Thessaly, 
Or when aloft on Msenalus he stops 
His flight, 'mid eddying pine-tree tops ! 

131 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

So, but from toil less sign of profit reaping, 
The sullen Spectre to her purpose bowed. 
Sweeping — ^vehemently sweeping — 
No pause admitted, no design avowed ! 
' Avaunt, inexplicable Guest ! — avaunt,' 
Exclaimed the Chieftain — 'Let me rather see 
The coronal that coiling vipers make ; 
The torch that flames with many a lurid flake, 
And the long train of doleful pageantry 
Which they behold, whom vengeful Furies haunt ; 
Who, while they struggle from the scourge to flee, 
Move where the blasted soil is not unworn. 
And, in their anguish, bear what other minds have 
born ! ' 



But Shapes that come not at an earthly call. 

Will not depart when mortal voices bid ; 

Lords of the visionary eye whose lid. 

Once raised, remains aghast, and will not fall ! 

Ye Gods, thought He, that servile implement 

Obeys a mystical intent ! 

Your minister would brush away 

The spots that to my soul adhere ; 

But should she labour night and day. 

They will not, cannot disappear ; 

Whence angry perturbations, — and that look 

Which no philosophy can brook ! 

Ill-fated chief ! there are whose hopes are built 

Upon the ruins of thy glorious name ; 

Who, through the portal of one moment's guilt, 

Pursue thee with their deadly aim ! 

O matchless perfidy ! portentous lust 

Of monstrous crime ! — that horror-striking blade, 

Drawn in defiance of the Gods, hath laid 

The noble Syracusan low in dust ! 

Shudder 'd the walls — the marble city wept — 

And sylvan places heaved a pensive sigh ; 

But in the calm peace the appointed Victim slept, 

As he had fallen in magnanimity ; 

132 



li 






THE BEST POETRY 

Of spirit too capacious to require 

That Destiny her course should change ; too just 

To his own native greatness to desire 

That wretched boon, days lengthened by mistrust. 

So were the hopeless troubles, that involved 

The soul of Dion, instantly dissolved. 

Released from life and cares of princely state, 

He left this moral grafted on his Fate : 

' Him only pleasure leads, and peace attends, 

Him, only him, the shield of Jove defends 

Whose means are fair and spotless as his ends.' " ^ 

What magnificent language and rhytlim ! Neverthe- 
less this poem, compared wdth the Ode on the Intimations 
of Immortality, may be classed as unknown ; yet it con- 
tains more and better poetry. 

Unfortunately the last three lines, if not clay, are not 
pure gold ; for it is not true that pleasure leads and peace 
attends, or that the shield of Jove defends the clean- 
handed hero, and we notice something trite in the enuncia- 
tion of the thought, Wordsworth should have found it 
obviously false, since he accepted Jesus of Nazareth as the 
perfect type. Yet, means fair and spotless as the end 
proposed are ideal requirements both in art and heroism. 
The contention that this scrupulousness, the ideal beauty 
of which is freely recognised, should control business, 
is probably the hardest bone of contention with which 
humanity is provided- — ^the one about which every com- 
promise of necessity begs the question. 

Brutus, Dion and Samson (who for Milton represented 
Cromwell) are such tragic figures because the beauty of 
their heroism became tarnished and ended in failure. 

For my fault-finding with Wordsworth I hope you will 
think I have made amends ; I would fain do as much for 
Browning, but time and capacity fail me for reading his 
magnificent Artemis Prologizes, perhaps the most splendid 

1 Poems of the Imagination^ xxxii. 

133 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

120 lines of blank verse in English. I will read one of his 
successful lyrics instead. 

Browning imagines a page-boy in love with a queen, 
and, while tending her hounds and hawks, complaining 
of this hopeless passion and overheard by her. 

" Give her but a least excuse to love me ! 
When — ^where — 

How — can this arm establish her above me, 
If fortune fixed her as my lady there, 
There already, to eternally reprove me ? 
(' Hist ! ' — said Kate the Queen ; 
But ' oh ! ' — ^cried the maiden, binding her tresses, 
' 'Tis only a page that carols unseen, 
Crumbling your hounds their messes ! ') 

Is she wronged ? — ^To the rescue of her honour. 

My heart ! 

Is she poor ? — What costs it to be styled a donor ? 

Merely an earth to cleave, a sea to part ? 

But that fortune should have thrust all this upon her 1 

(' Nay, list ! '^ — ^bade Kate the Queen ; 

And still cried the maiden binding her tresses, 

' 'Tis only a page that carols unseen, 

Fitting your hawks their jesses ! ') " ^ 

The turn of rhythm on "when — ^where — how" is so 
felicitous that it seems madness for a poet to dream of 
adding another stanza which, as coming second, should 
be more perfect. 
Yet when we read — 

" Is she wronged ? — ^To the rescue of her honour. 
My heart I 
Is she poor ? — What costs it to be styled a donor ? " — 

we breathe free, and glory in his triumph. 

Yet this song is not in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 
where under Browning's name several obviously inferior 
things appear. 

^ Pippa Passes^ Part II. 

134 



i 



THE BEST POETRY 

Ben Jonson, like Browning, produced a mass of work 
pregnant with intelligence, but which rarely became pure 
poetry. However, he, like Browning, yields a handful 
of perfect things. I will read one : 

" See the chariot at hand here of Love, 
Wherein my lady rideth ! 
Each that draws is a swan or a dove, 
And well the car Love guideth. 
As she goes, all hearts do duty 
Unto her beauty 

And, enamoured, do wish, so they might 
But enjoy such a sight. 
That they still were to run by her side 
Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride. 

Do but look on her eyes, they do light 

All that Love's world compriseth ! 

Do but look on her hair, it is bright 

As Love's star when it riseth ! 

Do but mark, her forehead's smoother 

Than words that soothe her ! 

And from her arched brows, such a grace 

Sheds itself through the face, 

As alone there triumphs to the life 

All the gain, all the good, of the elements' strife. 

Have you seen but a bright lily grow. 

Before rude hands have touched it ? 

Have you marked but the fall of the snow 

Before the soil hath smutched it ? 

Have you felt the wool of beaver ? 

Or swan's down ever ? 

Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier ? 

Or the nard in the fire ? 

Or have tasted the bag of the bee ? 

O so white ! O so soft ! O so sweet is she ! " ^ 

Palgrave failed to observe the marvellous perfection 
of this song. It is not in his Golden Treasury, which yet 

1 Underwoods, iv. 

135 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

contains so much poor stuff. It is by such feHcities as 
the climax — 

'* O so white ! O so soft ! O so sweet is she ! " — 

that the form of everj^ lyric should be a discovery. 

The surprise of this kind that seems to have fallen most 
directly out of heaven is the line — 

" Sad true lover never find my grave " — 

from the dirge in Twelfth Night. 

" Come away, come away, death, 
And in sad cypress let me be laid. 
Fly away, fly away, breath ; 
I am slain by a fair cruel maid. 
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew. 
Oh, prepare it ! 

My part of death, no one so true 
Did share it. 

Not a flower, not a flower sweet. 

On my black coflin let there be strown ; 

Not a friend, not a friend greet 

My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown : 

A thousand thousand sighs to save 

Lay me. Oh, where 

Sad true lover never find my grave 

To weep there ! " 

The difliculty of accounting for the scansion of that 
disquieted Shakespearean editors for upwards of two 
hundred years, till at last it was observed that the 
irregularity was exceedingly beautiful. So easily is the 
goal of aesthetic research obscured even for men as in- 
telligent as Pope or Capel. 

Now, for fear of enervating our taste by an over-constant 
effort to appreciate what is perfect, let us compare a 
stanza from the great lyric in Matthew Arnold's EmpedocleSt 
and one from Browning's much- vaunted Rabbi Ben Ezra^ 
with one from Shelley's To a Skylark, 

136 



THE BEST POETRY 

" In vain our pent wills fret, 
And would the world subdue ; 
Limits we did not set 
Condition all we do ; 
Born into life we are, and life must be our mould." 

Undoubtedly that is a true thought, and expressed with 
more cogency and clearness than — 

" Grow old along with me ! 
The best is yet to be, 

The last of life for which the first was made : 
Our times are in His hand 
Who saith, ' A whole I planned. 
Youth shows but half ; trust God ; see all nor be afraid ! '" 

It is obviously more often than not impossible to obey 
the command to grow old along with any genial old gentle- 
man ; it is often, also, untrue that the best is yet to be. 
No doubt it would be very consoling if experience bore 
out the old Rabbi ; but it does not. 

Now listen to Shelley, for the desired, the enchanting, 
the ever-acceptable accent which creates beauty and joy 
even out of depression : 

" We look before and after 
And pine for what is not : 
Our sincerest laughter 
With some pain is fraught ; 
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." 

True. To a Skylark treats continually of lovely and 
agreeable things, but so does Rabbi Ben Ezra ; he com- 
pares passionate youth with serene old age, and, refurbish- 
ing the hackneyed image of the potter and the clay, 
substitutes for the nondescript " vessel " a Grecian um. 
Yet with all these opportunities he never turns a single 
stanza so beautiful as the most abstract of Shelley's. 

The fact is, Browning represents Rabbi Ben Ezra as a 
prosperous old man enjoying a stately decUne, who allows 

137 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

his after-dinner optimism to get the better of his observa- 
tion and experience. He is moved by thought, but less 
conscious of its truth or beauty than of its supposed 
efficacy for cheering, that is bamboozling : and this 
purpose of his cannot beget afflatus sufficient to rise to a 
fine form and movement, so his utterance is outclassed not 
only by Shelley's, which is beautiful, but by Arnold's, 
which, though plain, is sincere. 

I mentioned that some of the best poetry has been 
honestly charged with inmiorality. Such accusations are 
usually made by people who regard the fact that poets 
can and often do preach excellent sermons as the only 
excuse for verse. Now to elucidate this difficulty we 
must conceive of English morality as something dependent 
on the customs and habits of the English, not as an 
absolute criterion of worth. In practical life it is a mis- 
take to run counter to one's neighbours without a 
weighty reason without being prepared to suffer as a 
consequence. 

But in the realm of contemplation, whither poetry 
should lift us, morality, instead of being established, is a 
project. 

There, if it is not to prove futile, neither deed nor doer 
must be left unconsidered, but the whole reality must be 
harmoniously reviewed. For this reason we should wel- 
come all who can give fine literary form to any accident, 
however inconvenient that accident may be in a mun- 
dane sphere. An unpalatable truth thus becomes 
associated with beauty^ — an object for contemplation, 
yielding refreshment and recreation. 

"It is all very well in a book," as people say of ex- 
travagant behaviour, implying that in practice it is less 
pardonable ; and what they say is quite true. Only 
their tone of voice may be disparaging to literature and 
betray the penury of their taste. 

A consequence of this more comprehensive horizon 

138 



THE BEST POETRY 

which poetry demands is that a poem must not only 
be enthralHng by beauty and intensity, but, if it be of 
any length, by its interest. 

Rossetti rightly queried whether a long poem ought 
not to be as absorbing as a novel. It ought. A novel 
need only fail of being a poem by that degree of beauty 
which formal rhythms have over informal. Most novels 
do fail in many other ways, but many long poems fail just 
where good novels succeed. It is in vital interest that 
Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet and Othello are so 
superior to Paradise Lost, though that poem perhaps 
maintains a higher level of beauty than they do. 

Can the interest proper to great poems be distinguished 
from that aroused by imaginative prose ? By intensity ? 
Hardly ; rather by quality, by perfection. Poetry 
transports us into its newly created world more delicately, 
with a finer respect for the bloom of the soul. The 
superiority is of mood rather than of power. The mind 
is carried among objects and events with a motion that 
more nearly satisfies innate desire : even so Zephyros 
conveyed Psyche from the piled logs on the rocky peak 
to a lawn in the gardens of Love's house. In like manner 
dancing contents the body better than walking or running 
or drilling. In the flight of some birds and in the swim- 
ming of certain fish we recognise an ideal smoothness and 
continuity, but dancing adds to this a conscious ecstasy ; 
skill triumphs over known difficulties, elation lifts the 
body, which no longer merely serves, but becomes the 
disinterested vehicle of the soul, its partner and friend. 
Thus the movement of poetry weds the mind's desire. 

Wordsworth found fault with The Ancient Mariner 
because the chief character remains passive, is acted on 
but does little. Now perhaps he appealed to a traditional 
error in thus accounting for the small effect produced by 
the Lyrical Ballads when first issued. We are, I think, 
as a matter of fact, as much interested by what happens 

139 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

to a man as by what he does. We do not understand the 
universe ; therefore, though we contemplate the actions 
of men with more intuitive comprehension, more awe and 
curiosity is aroused by the working of external agencies 
as it affects men's lives. Science has not yet explained 
any force, not even those which we intuitively compre- 
hend because we feel them in motion within ; the imagina- 
tion therefore freely lends a conditional credence to stories 
of spirits and phantoms, and the knowledge that our for- 
bears were fully contented with them powerfully seconds 
their appeal. 

Still the shooting of an albatross remains a trifling 
action compared with its results and with the length of the 
poem, and Hart Leap Well assuredly treats a like theme 
with more proportion. Yet small actions sometimes 
have gigantic effects ; a sudden shout may dislodge an 
avalanche, therefore we cannot regard such proportion 
as essential to a work of art. The only fault with 
which I can reproach Coleridge's masterpiece was due 
to Wordsworth's proiupting. 

" He prayeth best who loveth best 
All things both great and small : 
For the dear God, who loveth us, 
He made and loveth all." 

Though these words come quite convincingly from the 
old sailor, by their position they seem in part addressed 
to us by the poet, and acquire a tinge of aesthetic imperti- 
nence. Besides their insistence detracts from that passion- 
ate fondness for the Albatross which caused the lonely 
spirit to follow the ship nine fathom deep, by treating his 
action as a cog in the machinery of providence. Apart 
from this slight strain introduced at Wordsworth's sugges- 
tion, we are lifted and absorbed by the story with a delicate 
completeness unrivalled by any poem of equal or greater 
length since written. Michael and The Ruined Cottage, 
profoundly organised though they are, attain nothing like 

140 



THE BEST POETRY 

this felicity of movement. Though Enoch Arden and The 
Ring and the Book are as interesting as novels, they fali 
like novels also, the one by lack of the distinction that an 
utter sincerity gives, the other by lack of the conciseness 
that the love of beauty dictates. Keats 's Lamia, Arnold's 
Empedocles, though less absorbing, more nearly marry a 
considerable interest to a proportionate beauty ; Sohrab 
and Rustum, which perhaps does more, yet remains too 
conscious of Homer's example to escape a certain flavour 
of pedantry. Again, Mr Yeats's dramas succeed in ming- 
ling interest and beauty better than any of those by the 
Victorian poets ; though several, Hke Browning's Strafford, 
are more powerful, or like Swinburne's Atalanta, more 
original, or like Tennyson's The Cup, more theatrical. 

We, like the folk of many previous ages, have it dinned 
into our ears that poetry, to be great, must treat of actual 
preoccupations, and not harp on any which are as notably 
neglected as was the ideal of justice in Dante's day. Well, 
well, let us allow that a most worthy kind of people at 
present discuss plans for mitigating the evils of social in- 
equality. How does the best poetry treat this problem ? 

Not in Lloyd George's way, nor yet like Mr and Mrs 
Webb, nor even like Bernard Shaw. Their ways are, of 
course, aimed at and achieve a different kind of success. 
But do they as grandly allay our passions and restore us 
to as propitious a frame of mind ? 

The opinions of Byron and Shelley took their cue from 
the advanced political thinkers of that day, but failed 
to inspire their loftiest verse. Such themes as personal 
guilt and loneliness, or some woman, some cloud, a skylark 
or the healing power of night inspired their happiest 
flights. They chanted freedom, indeed, but are on this 
theme outclassed by Wordsworth, who was soon to become 
a hopeless reactionary. However, a poet never praised 
for thought conceived our problem in very lovely verse, 
almost as we realise it to-day. 

141 






SOME SOLDIER POETS 

" With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt 
Enriched from ancestral merchandize, 
And for them many a weary hand did swelt 
In torched mines and noisy factories, 
And many once proud-quiver'd loins did melt 
In blood from stinging whip ; — with hollow eyes 
Many all day in dazzling river stood. 
To take the rich-or'd driftings of the flood. 

For them the Ceylon diver held his breath. 
And went all naked to the hungry shark ; 
For them his ears gush'd blood ; for them in death 
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark 
Lay full of darts ; for them alone did seethe 
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark : 
Half-ignorant, they turned an easy wheel, 
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel. 

Why were they proud ? Because their marble founts 
Gushed with more pride than do a wretch's tears ? — 
Why were they proud ? Because fair orange-mounts 
Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs ? — 
Why were they proud ? Because red-lined accounts 
Were richer than the songs of Grecian years ? — 
Why were they proud ? again we ask aloud. 
Why in the name of Glory were they proud ? " 

That question is so much more winsome than an accusa- 
tion. What have we, any of us, added to favouring cir- 
cumstance to warrant pride ? Asked not in the name of 
justice, but of Glory. How universal the difficulty of a 
reply appears ! To rail at tyrants is by comparison as 
though, when a little girl was naughty, we should scold 
her dolls ; for kings and governors are only the toys of 
that lust for possessing which makes us all, rich and poor 
alike, so negligent of nobler things. 

Though the first line of Endymion has become a pro- 
verb and already smells musty, serious people have not 
acquired the habit of looking for truth in beauty, where 
the nearest approach to it can be made. They expect and 

142 



THE BEST POETRY 

recommend precisely the opposite course, and approved 
Lord Tennyson when in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After 
he set the turbid accusations of Carlyle and Ruskin to 
tuneful numbers, although he failed of Keats's success. 
Whereas a living poet, never mentioned by those who 
plume themselves on preoccupation with these problems 
has, I think, surpassed those slightly rhetorical stanzas 
in Keats's Pot of Basil, which had remained the high- 
water mark of expression on this theme. 

A vision of those who suffer ranged like beggars on 
either side of the streaming street of active life has come 
to this poet. Like figures conceived by Rembrandt or 
Rodin, they appeal to us with patience and resignation, 
and he bids the nimble-footed crowd gaze on these their 
fellows whose feet are so slow that from age to age they 
seem to have advanced no more than statues. For him 
they are the statues cut out of flesh more enduring 
than marble, that in spite of change is ever the same in 
its capacity to suffer. . 

" Tarry a moment, happy feet 
That to the sound of laughter glide ! 
O glad ones of the evening street, 
Behold what forms are at your side ! 

You conquerors of the toilsome day 
Pass by with laughter, labour done ; 
But these within their durance stay ; 
Their travail sleeps not with the sun. 

They like dim statues without end, 
Their patient attitudes maintain ; 
Your triumphing bright course attend, 
But from your eager ways abstrain. 

Now, if you chafe in secret thought, 
A moment turn from light distress, 
And see how Fate on these have wrought. 
Who yet so deeply acquiesce. 

143 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

Behold them, stricken, silent, weak, 
The maimed, the mute, the halt, the blind. 
Condemned in hopeless hope to seek 
The thing which they shall never find. 

They haunt the shadows of your ways 
In masks of perishable mould : 
Their souls a changing flesh arrays, 
But they are changeless from of old. 

Their lips repeat an empty call, 
But silence wraps their thoughts around. 
On them, like snow, the ages fall ; 
Time muffles all this transient sound. 

When Shalmaneser pitched his tent 
By Tigris, and his flag unfurled. 
And forth his summons proudly sent 
Into the new unconquered world ; 

Or when with spears Cambyses rode 
Through Memphis and her bending slaves, 
Or first the Tyrian gazed abroad 
Upon the bright vast outer waves ; 

When sages, star-instructed men. 
To the young glory of Babylon 
Foreknew no ending ; even then 
Innumerable years had flown, 

Since first the chisel in her hand 
Necessity, the sculptor, took, 
And in her spacious meaning planned 
These forms, and that eternal look ; 

These foreheads, moulded from afar. 
These soft, unfathomable eyes. 
Gazing from darkness, like a star ; 
These lips, whose grief is to be wise. 

144 ^ 



\ 



THE BEST POETRY 

As from the mountain marble rude 
The growing statue rises fair, 
She from immortal patience hewed 
The limbs of ever-young despair. 

There is no bliss so new and dear, 
It hath not them far-off allured. 
All things that we have yet to fear 
They have already long endured. 

Nor is there any sorrow more 
Than hath ere now befallen these, 
Whose gaze is as an opening door 
On wild interminable seas. 

O Youth, run fast upon thy feet. 
With full joy haste thee to be filled, 
And out of moments brief and sweet 
Thou shalt a power for ages build. 

Does thy heart falter ? Here, then, seek 
What strength is in thy kind ! With pain 
Inmnortal bowed, these mortals weak 
Gentle and unsubdued remain." 

That I think is first-rate poetry. It does not attribute 
to human agency what possibly lies beyond its scope, in 
order either to praise or blame. It recognises that some 
virtues are almost always the work of adversity, others of 
prosperity ; some proper to youth and health, others to 
age and suffering ; and it is thus considerate while rapt 
in an ecstasy of contemplation such as can but clothe 
itself in delightful phrases and felicitous images. 

To my mind the stanza about aged stricken folk is the 
finest : 

" There is no bliss so new and dear, 
It hath not them far-off allured. 
All things that we have yet to fear 
They have already long endured " — 

K 145 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 

while above all the others I prize the two lines — 

" She from immortal patience hewed 
The limbs of ever-yoimg despair." 

Yet while I thus distinguish, I reprove myself for separat- 
ing them from the wave of five stanzas, of which they 
form the crest : 

" Since first the chisel in her hand 
Necessity, the sculptor, took. 
And in her spacious meaning planned 
These forms, and that eternal look ; 

These foreheads, moulded from afar. 
These soft, unfathomable eyes. 
Gazing from darkness, like a star ; 
These lips, whose grief is to be wise. 

As from the mountain marble rude 
The growing statue rises fair. 
She from immortal patience hewed 
The limbs of ever-young despair. 

There is no bliss so new and dear, 
It hath not them far-off allured. 
All things that we have yet to fear 
They have already long endured. 

Nor is there any sorrow more 
Than hath ere now befallen these. 
Whose gaze is as an opening door 
On wild interminable seas." 

That I think is more successful poetry than any in 
Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra or in Tennyson's Locksley 
Hall ; nay, more successful than any produced by those 
great poets after the first glorious flush had paled on the 
forehead of their youthful genius. Is it not well described 
by Shelley's line — 

146 



THE BEST POETRY 

" Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest 
thought " ? 

It is the work of Laurence Binyon, and published in his 
London Visions, 

Now these are merely my opinions, and should not be 
adopted by you : nor need they ever become yours, 
unless your progress towards the distant goal of a 
perfect appreciation of excellence should happen to lead 
you over the very same spot where I now stand. 

Each one of you is a traveller over these delectable 
mountains, and not what has delighted me or any other 
pilgrim brings you on your way and holds off fatigue and 
depression, but what delights you. Only be occupied and 
ever anew eager in arranging what you admire by order 
of merit. Examine your preferences, do not rest content 
with enjoying them, and you will grow aware of niceties 
and differences in what is admirable that otherwise would 
have escaped your notice. You will invigorate and 
render rational what may have seemed the truly mystical 
fascination which verse exerted over you. 

Let me warn you against negative standards. Never 
record your impressions by enumerating faults, as the 
new^spaper critic so often does. Never accept the absence 
of apparent flaws as proof of the presence of excellence. 
Keep to the positive merits and try to define them ; 
merely turn away from what calls for blame. Disparaging 
warps the mind far worse than over-lauding. Above all, 
institute comparisons whenever you find two poets 
treating the same theme or using the same form with 
felicity to diverse effect, or in any way rivalling one 
another. Animals see, breathe and feel, man alone dis- 
covers, appreciates and admires ; it is not enough to 
passively enjoy ; we must create order in our experiences. 



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